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CHRISTI IMAGO 

OR 

THE CHRISTED LIFE 



BY DEAN TOLMAN 

URBS BEATA 
A Vision of the Perfect Life 

"Profoundly spiritual thought blends 
here with fine simplicity, and the wisdom 
of an accomplished scholar with the truth 
as it is in Jesus." — The Outlook (N. Y.). 

"Dr. Tolman's motto seems to be non 
multa sed multum." — Church Standard. 

"Combines virility with quiet devoutness 
to an unusual degree." — The Living Church. 

"Happy the college student into whose 
soul are dropped such seed thoughts. . . . 
Dr. Tolman has the gift of saying a great 
deal in few words. His talks are always 
thoughtful and inspiring, and are sugges- 
tive of reserved power. The religious spirit 
of the book is lofty and healthy." — Amer- 
ican Weekly (Chicago). 

VIA CRUCIS 
Lesson of Holy Week 

"Dr. Tolman has the gift of speaking 
home truths in such fashion that they go 
straight to the heart and conscience. . . . 
This is an admirable little book, cleai-, 
forceful, and instructive." — The Southern 
Churchman. 

"There is a vividness about the whole 
presentation of the theme, centuries old 
and ever new. a personal touch that makes 
it very effective." — The Churchman. 

THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO., 
Milwaukee, Wis. 



CHRISTI IMAGO 

or 

THE CHRISTED LIFE 



THOUGHTS FOR THE SUNDAYS 
OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR 



By 

Herbert Gushing Tolman 

Ph.D., S.T.D., LL.D.' 

Dean, and Professor of Greek, 

Vanderbilt University 

Hon. Canon, All Saints* Cathedral, 

Milwaukee 



Milwaukee 

The Young Churchman Co. 

1915 



^^ ^'''^^ 



Copyright by 

THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. 

1915 



0/^ 

AUG 1 1 1915 

©CI.A411016 



s> 



TO 

MY SAINTED 

MOTHER AND FATHER 

WHOSE CHRISTED LIVES HAVE EVER BEEN 
MY GUIDE AND INSPIRATION 



FOREWORD 

Christianity is the life of Christ realized in the personal 
capacity of man. The new birth is the beginning of this life 
in the soul. Its complete development is Christian Character. 
Salvation is the gradual emancipation from our lower selves 
bringing us unto the attainment of the perfect freedom of the 
sons of God. Its consummation is Christ similitude. This 
formed the central thought of a series of meditations which the 
undersigned contributed as devotional editor to The Living 
Church during the year 1914-15. These meditations are here 
grouped together in book form under the title Christi Imago, 
with the prayer that they may be the humble instrument through 
God's help of bringing comfort and strength. May the Image 
of Christ be so stamped on our souls that men seeing us may 
see the Lord Jesus Himself. So our lives will ever be the reve- 
lation of the love and sacrifice of our divine Saviour. 

H. C. TOLMAN. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Lesson of Advent. First Sunday in Advent 1 

Emmanuel. The Second Sunday in Advent 4 

Bethlehem. The Third Sunday in Advent 7 

No Room for Him in the Inn. The Fourth Sunday in Advent 10 

Here Christ was Born. Christmas Day 13 

Following the Star. Epiphany 16 

The One Shepherding. The First Sunday after Epiphany - - 19 

God and Mammon. Second Sunday after Epiphany - - - - 22 

The Power of Vision. Third Sunday after Epiphany - - - 25 

Christian Growth. Septuagesima 28 

The Divine in Man. Sexagesima 31 

God's Sympathy. Quinquagesima 34 

The Aristocracy of Service. First Sunday in Lent - - - - 37 

The Joy of Our Lord. Second Sunday in Lent 40 

The Uplifted Christ. Third Sunday in Lent 43 

The School of the Cross. Fourth Sunday in Lent - - - - 46 

The Annunciation. Feast of the Annunciation 49 

The Joy of the Cross. Pahn Sunday 52 

Resurreixit. Easter 55 

The Lesson of the Resurrection, First Sunday after Easter 58 

The Permanence of Life. The Second Sunday after Easter - 61 

The IncorriJptible Crown. The Third Sunday after Easter - 64 

The Entrance Into Life Everlasting. The Fourth Sunday 

after Easter 67 

The Soul's Achievement. Ascension Day 70 

Revelation. Sunday after Ascension 73 

The Halo of Divine Intensity. Whitsunday 76 



X CONTEXTS 

PAGE 

The A^'CHOB of the Soul. Trinity Sunday 79 

Spibitual Dissipation. First Sunday after Trinity - - - . 82 

Life Measured by Utioty. Second Sunday after Trinity - - 85 

Peesoxality. Third Sunday after Trinity 88 

The Keys of the Kixgdom of Heavex. Fourth Sunday after 

Trinity 91 

;My Brother's Keeper. Fifth Sunday after Trinity - - - - 94 

The Power of Love. Sixth Sunday after Trinity 97 

The Pure ix Heart. Seventh Sunday after Trinity - - - - 100 

The Spirit of Prayer. Eighth Sunday after Trinity - - - - 103 

The Tbaxsfigubed Christ. The Transfiguration 106 

He Came Dowx from the Mouxtaix. Tenth Sunday after 

Trinity - - - 109 

Thixk ox These Thixgs. Eleventh Sunday after Trinity - - 112 

The Captaix of Oue Salvatiox. Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 115 

SoxsHiP. Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity 118 

Retaliatiox. Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 121 

The Still Small Voice. Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity - - 124 

Our Body the Temple of God. Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 127 

HuMAX Judgmext. Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity - - - 130 

The Aximal axd the Dfvtxe. Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 132 

The Shadow of Life. Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity - - - 135 

Pltiity of Heart. Twentieth Sunday after Trinity - - - - 138 

Faithfulxt:ss. Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity - - - - 141 

GtOd's Whisper to the Soul. All Saints' Day 144 

Progress, Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity 147 

A Holy Te:mple. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity - - - 150 

Apostleship. Sundav next before Advent 153 



THE LESSON OF ADVENT 

THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT 

CHE Church throughout the world celebrates the beginning 
of another Christian Year. In every Christian land special 
chants are sung, special prayers are offered, special sermons are 
preached, and the church bells ring to usher in the Advent 
season. It is a beautiful custom that four Sundays should be 
set apart as a time of preparation for the Holy Nativity of the 
Lord Jesus, just as it is a beautiful custom that the world 
should halt in its whirl and rush of business and pleasure and 
for forty days prepare for the solemn scenes of the Crucifixion 
and the joy of the Easter dawn. 

The Christian year is full of hallowed associations, and as 
we contemplate them we should draw nearer the great loving 
heart of the Redeemer. Let us not for a moment allow these 
holy things to become mechanical. Let us not for a moment 
ask ourselves simply what is socially proper for us at this 
season. 

Advent means something more than singing the Benedictus: 
sometliing more than purple vestments of penitence. The 
words of the sacred chant must be a part of our own experience. 
It must be the expression of my own soul's life when I say, 
"Blessed be the Lord God, for He has redeemed me — He gave 
light to me when T sat in darkness and guides my feet in the 
way of peace." 



2 CHRISTI IjVIAGO 

This is the Advent lesson, the coming of Christ into our 
own life. 

What a transcendently holy thing this is! the entrance of 
Christ into our daily work, our daily duties, our daily thoughts, 
our daily aspirations, our daily trials, our daily sorrows. A life 
loses its monotony, and no burden is too hard to bear, because 
all is sanctified by His presence. 

The Roman dogma of the Immaculate Conception teaches 
that the Virgin Mother must have been sinless to receive the 
Son of God. Whatever may be its theological value, there re- 
mains behind the controversies of the Franciscans and Domini- 
cans, behind the quibbling of the schoolmen, this deep, under- 
lying truth, that the human soul must be made pure and holy 
to be the abode of the pure and holy Christ. 

This is the central thought of Advent. It is so easy for 
religion to become external and so easy to forget that Christi- 
anity is the life of Christ in the human soul. 

We come to the Holy Communion and trust that in this 
sacrament of His love we are receiving our Lord into ourselves. 
If our hearts are made more fit to be His sacred habitation, the 
divine presence does enter there in greater fulness. But first 
the preparation. 

Darkness and light cannot dwell together, neither can hate 
and love, cleanness and uncleanness, truth and untruth. 

Can the Lord of Purity, the Lord of Love, the Lord of 
Truth, the Lord of Light, enter and abide in the soul which is 
filled with impurity, hate, untruth, prejudice? 

He stands at the door waiting for us to receive Him. 

How touchingly is the coming of Christ to the human soul 
illustrated by Holman Hunt's beautiful painting, "The Light 
of the World." The Christ approaches in the darkness. The 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 3 

light He carries falls on the brambles and weeds, the tendrils 
of the ivy, the rusty bars and nails which fast bind the closed 
door. The saintly form of the Redeemer is robed in priestly 
vestments, the symbol of His royal and prophetic power. The 
crown is interwoven with thorns bearing tender leaves to be 
the balm of human hearts. He waits that the door may open 
to let Him in. 

May our hearts be open to the Christ at this Advent season ! 
May He enter in, dispelling by His holy presence all unworthy 
thoughts and imaginings, and may He make His abode there 
the throne of His Kingdom of Love, guiding every act and 
filling us with the spirit of His divine consecration and service ! 

What infinite joy to the heart of God when He sees the 
Christ image in the soul of man! Jacob Eiis tells how the old 
silversmith of Hamburg takes the metal with all its dross and 
alloy and heats it in his crucible. In long watchings he waits 
patiently for the transition. He smiles at last when he sees 
reflected his own image, for then he knows the precious and 
genuine silver has come. 

So God smiles when He sees His own image reflected in 
human hearts, for then Lie knows the Sacrifice of Calvary is 
consummated in that life; but it is not consummated until then. 



EMMANUEL 

THE SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT 

$0 many have a hypothetical God! They think of Him as a 
God who revealed Himself in the past by certain signs and 
wonders, or as a God who will reveal Himself in the future by 
some transcendent vision. They believe that when the eye is 
closed in death the spiritual sight will comprehend God. They 
look backward or forward toward some divine Epiphany. The 
God whom Christ revealed was Emmanuel, the God who is with 
us now. Our Lord had the most absolute and certain assurance 
of the divine presence in every hour of His Life. He addressed 
the Father as if by His side. 

Christ's faith was not mere intellectual assent to Jewish 
dogma, but a trust in God through joy and sorrow. The first 
petition our Lord taught us was "Hallowed be Thy name." We 
must cross this threshold before we can come within the realm 
of prayer. In this we make God's will our will, consecrating 
ourselves as a part of God's plan, helpers in God's work, instru- 
ments to carry out God's desires. Through this, our prayer 
takes the sweep of divine vision. It links us to God. 

An old epitaph from an English churchyard reads as fol- 
lows : 

"Here lies Martin Oldenbrod, 
Have mercy on my soul, O God, 
As I would do. if I were God, 
And Thou wert Martin Oldenbrod." 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 5 

Poor man! He thought if God were only as kind and 
merciful as himself, it would be well with him. His idea of 
God was the dark God of medievalism, not the God of Christ's 
faith, not the revelation of the loving heart of the Infinite 
Father. 

Eeligion is a thing not of authority, but of experience. 
Authority may say, "The Sistine Madonna is a masterpiece." 
We may accept this statement, but the picture means nothing 
to us until we stand before it and make the work of the master 
a part of ourselves. The beautiful words of the twenty-third 
Psalm become to us a revelation, not because the psalmist ut- 
tered them, but only when, by association with God, we can say 
truly as concerns our own life: "The Lord is our Shepherd." 
Authority may say that Christ came to earth, suffered and died, 
but the great fact of the incarnation is vital to us only when 
we enter into the suffering and death of Christ, making His 
life our life. 

Emmanuel, "God with us," explains life. That one word 
answers all our questionings and perplexities and doubts. 
It takes us out of ourselves and makes us co-workers witli 
God. 

Schopenhauer compared man's estimate of himself in the 
past with present altruism by the analogy of the science of 
Astronomy. Men used to think that the great heavenly bodies 
concerned themselves with human life, that their rising and 
setting had to do with their little existence, that their ascend- 
ing in the horizon was mysteriously bound up with their own 
fate. It was tliought that this earth was the center of our sys- 
tem, and that all worlds revolved around it. Now we know that 
the earth is but an infinitesimal part of the heavenly bodies 
which revolve around the sun, and our solar system forms but 



6 CHRISTI IMAGO 

one part of numberless systems stretching out towards infini- 
tude. 

So man thinks that God's world centers about him, his 
petty desires, ambitions, his narrow and selfish self, but when 
God's light enters the soul he sees with divine vision that he 
is but a part, yet a very real part of God's great purpose. A 
friend said to Lincoln during the Civil War: "We are sure of 
victory, for God is on our side." Lincoln replied: "That is 
altogether the wrong consideration. The question is not whether 
God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side." 

Always in life, in our ambitions, our aspirations, our en- 
deavors, our daily work, in our sorrows, disappointments, trials, 
adversities, let us ask this question. Can we truly say: "Em- 
manuel, 'God with us' " ? 



BETHLEHEM 

THE THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT 

TT was a windy and dusty day when we left Jerusalem for 
Bethlehem. Going southward, we passed the vale of Hin- 
nom, a valley filled with weird and uncanny legends. A short 
distance beyond are some Arabic ruins associated by tradi- 
tion with the house of Simeon. It is a beautiful story which 
describes how the old man desired to see the Infant Jesus. His 
tottering steps led him to the temple and he held the babe in 
his arms. It is a poetic picture, a beautiful antithesis — old age 
and infancy, the life nearly ended receiving the life just begun. 
He chants the Nunc dimiUis, "Now lettest Thou Thy servant 
depart in peace." 

Along the dusty road about two miles further we come to 
ascending ground which spreads before us a beautiful pano- 
rama. In front is Bethlehem. Behind is the Holy City with 
its walls and towers and domes. Further to the east is the 
Mount of Olives, while beyond lies the desert of Judea stretch- 
ing to the Dead Sea. The horizon is flanked by the 
mountains of Moab. Here the eye rests upon places associated 
with hallowed memories of the birth, life, and death of our 
Lord. 

The approach to Bethlehem is impressive. The town rests 
upon a hill formed by a succession of most verdant terraces. 
In antiquity it was known for its fertility. The very deriva- 



8 CHRISTI IMAGO 

tion of the name Bethlehem, "House of bread," speaks of abun- 
dance and plenty. 

The modern inhabitants, who number about eight thou- 
sand, work crosses, rosaries, brooches, and medallions out of 
pearl and a peculiar stone obtained from the Dead Sea. 

The Church of the Nativity lies on the east side of the 
town. In front is a square surrounded by the walls of cloisters, 
barracks, and public offices. 

We enter the Church through a low door. To pass this 
portal every head must bow as if in homage to the Babe of 
Bethlehem. 

The double aisles are flanked by rows of huge monolithic 
columns supporting rude Corinthian capitals. 

Tradition which dates from the second century connects 
the subterranean grotto over which the Church is built with the 
scene of the Nativity. This tradition is strengthened by the 
fact that Bethlehem has been almost constantly inhabited since 
the time of Christ, and hither the Jews came after the fall of 
Jerusalem. It was customary to use caves as stables in the old 
days as is done now, and the cavern beneath the edifice is the 
only cavern in this locality. For sixteen hundred years Chris- 
tian worship has been offered on this very spot. 

We descend into the cave beneath the choir and come to the 
chapel of the Nativity, the traditional site of the birth of our 
Saviour. Directly opposite is the chapel of the Manger, con- 
taining the marble vault supposed to have been found by the 
Empress Helena. A little further on is the altar of the Adora- 
tion of the Magi. 

We next descend a few steps to the chapel of the Inno- 
cents, where a late tradition localizes the slaughter of the chil- 
dren by Herod. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 9 

We go on a little distance and come to the rock-hewn tomb 
of St. Jerome ; a little beyond this is a chapel of the same Saint. 

We know that Jerome retired to Bethlehem where he died. 
An early tradition connects his burial place with the Grotto of 
the Nativity. A painting in this chapel pictures the Saint with 
a Bible in his hand, which he had translated from Hebrew into 
Latin. 

To the east of the town is the Field of the Shepherds, not 
far from which is a verdant plain associated with the charming 
idyl of the Book of Ruth. 

At the very spot hallowed by the birth of Jesus are sta- 
tioned Turkish soldiers with loaded rifles to keep order lest the 
Christian sects who enjoy the privileges of the Church engage 
in wrangling and strife. 

It is told us that recently a nail fell from the fastening of 
one of the lamps which hang in the chapel and immediately 
Greeks and Armenians came to blows. A troop of eight Turk- 
ish soldiers was summoned to stand guard over the nail until 
the quarrel was settled in the courts. 

What a parody this is on the teachings of. the Redeemer ! 
Hatred, contention, greed, and bitterness in the very spot where 
the Prince of Peace was born. 

Is any of this spirit in the lives of Christians in other 
lands? 



NO ROOM FOR HIM IN THE INN 

THE FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT 

771 ITH what people was the inn at Bethlehem crowded on the 
\%r night of the Nativity? Rich tradesmen were there with 
their sacks of gold to pay their taxes at Jerusalem. E-oman 
soldiers were there, insolent and haughty in their military pre- 
rogatives. Pharisees were there, proud in the perfection and 
ceremonial grandeur of their religion. The frivolous and gay 
were there, feasting and merrymaking. There was no one who 
cared where a poor Jewish woman met the pains of motherhood. 

If they had known who it was that was being born in 
yonder stable, that it was the Lord of Glory, that to His name 
hospitals, churches, and grandest cathedrals would be erected, 
that the power of His Life would inspire the noblest in art, 
poetry, and song, that at last before Him every knee would 
bow, would they not have proudly given Him the choicest guest 
chamber ? 

So to-day Christ comes to society and there is no room for 
Him. He is crowded out of our social pleasures, out of our 
business life, out of our intellectual life. 

As He did two thousand years ago, Christ comes to our 
hearts and asks that a room be given Him where His presence 
may ever dwell; not some spare chamber which we open only 
on certain days, but the large living room of our heart. 

How many Christians have only the spare room for Christ, 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 11 

some moments spared out of their busy life, a Sunday morning 
at church, a devotional meeting, a day of sorrow and bereave- 
ment! 

ISTo, Christ cannot enter the life in that way. The chamber 
we give to Him must be very large, for He brings into it His 
cross with the great world burden upon it. He brings into it 
the throne of absolute supremacy. He brings into it His love. 
His peace. His joy. 

Is our heart impure ? He will fill it with His purity. Is it 
selfish ? He will fill it with His self-renunciation. Is it hateful 
and suspicious? He will fill it with His forgiveness and His 
love. Is it proud and mean? He will fill it with His humility 
and service. Is it narrow? He will fill it with His broadness. 

Amid all our elegance, refinement, wealth, education, and 
culture, shall Christ again have to be born in a stable? 

The world erects its great cathedrals for Him with tlie 
gilded cross upon the Heaven-pointing spire. Here burns the 
dim light at the altar which betokens the divine presence in 
the sanctuary. The sublimest music rolls through the arches 
and the priceless paintings on the walls tell of His sufferings 
for humanity. Surely is not this a regal chamber for the King 
of kings? 

But the loving heart of Jesus turns for its grandest temple 
to the human heart, and with pierced hand He knocks and 
asks, "Where is My chamber?" 

How does He knock? I answer. In the cry of sorrow and 
poverty, in the distress of suffering, in the degradation of the 
fallen. These sorrows which echo in our ears are Christ asking 
admission into our lives. 

We may engage in solemn worship, but the cry of the 
hungry unheeded shows Christ's guest chamber still closed. 



12 CHRISTI IMAGO 

The call of duty, the demand for clean, honest, unselfish 
living, are the voice of Christ demanding admission to the guest 
chamber. 

But the door is hard to open. The lock is rusted by selfish- 
ness. Stout tendrils of greed and avarice surround the portal. 
The room itself is darkened by prejudice, pride, and envy, and 
is no fit abode for the Redeemer of the world. 

But when He enters He brings Heaven with Him. Love 
illumines the chamber of the soul. He spreads His table and 
gives of His spiritual food and drink. 

And so the Saviour is making day by day the chamber of 
cur hearts a sanctuary un;til at the last life is ready to enter 
the place which He Himself has prepared. "In My Father's 
house are many rooms. I go to prepare a room for you." 

Salvation, then, is a very simple thing. Christ our guest 
has so transformed our life by His presence that we become 
fitted to be His guests. 



HERE CHRIST WAS BORN 

CHRISTMAS DAY 

CRADITIOl^ makes the Saviour's birth a time of universal 
peace. The temple of Janus was closed. The Koman 
legions pushed not on to foreign conquest. Throughout the 
empire the din of war had ceased. ISTature was at rest. No 
storm or tempest raged. The starlit heavens bent close to earth, 
as if to share the gladness of the world. 

"Peaceful was the night 

Wherein the Prince of Light 
His reign upon the earth began. 

The winds with wonder whist, 
Smoothly the waters kist, 

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean 
Who now had quite forgot to rave ; 

While birds of calm sat brooding 
On the charmed wave," 

In the imperial capital were the revels and orgies of the 
Saturnalia, the feasting and entertainments of the brilliant 
pageants of the court. Not in the palace of the Palatine, nor 
by the mighty, nor the proud, nor the wise, was heard the 
Christmas message. It was humble shepherds in the still 
watches of the night who caught the sound of angels singing: 

"Peace on earth to men of good will !" 

And so to-day for those alone who have the love, the joy, 
which are made the conditions of the heavenly proclamation. 



14 CHRISTI IMAGO 

has Christmas a vital si^ificance. The lesson of the holy day 
is self-giving. That surely was the central truth twenty cen- 
turies ago, when God gave His divinest gift in the Child of 
Bethlehem, and down through the years He has claimed as our 
highest privilege and duty the service of our lives. Help to the 
needy, sympathy for the distressed, uplifting of the degraded, 
bring a Christmas joy transcending the vying of friends in the 
exchange of costly presents. 

As the darkness of the night falls on the Judean plain, a 
long procession of pilgrims leave the Church of the Holy Sep- 
ulchre, pass through the Via Dolorosa, out of St. Stephen's 
gate, and tramp their weary way over the road that leads to 
Bethlehem. Here they gather in the square before the Church 
of the Virgin, and enter the ancient edifice through the low 
portal. 

The Grotto of the Nativity is adorned with fifteen silver 
lamps, while there sparkles in the pavement a golden star 
bearing the inscription, ''Hie Christus natus est," "Here Christ 
was born." 

As I looked on this glistening emblem I thought how the 
Christmas lesson demands that these significant words be indel- 
ibly carved upon the human heart. What a meaning to Christ- 
mas if we can say, "Here in our soul Christ is born to-day." 
May Christmas be to us the birth of the soul's life, which shall 
grow more and more into the likeness of the divine. 

The birth of Christ was the greatest event in history, for 
it marked a civilization pervaded by love, justice, and truth. 

The birth of Christ was the greatest event in theology, for 
it meant the hypostatic union, the indwelling of the human and 
the divine. 

But the vital thought of Christmas is something more than 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 15 

the historical Christ, something more than the theologic Christ; 
it is the personal Christ bom in the hearts of men. 

This brings rest amid unrest, joy amid sorrow, hope amid 
despair. 

Christmas is more than Christmas greetings, more than the 
exchange of happy gifts, more than the reunion of the near and 
dear under the roof of the old home, more than Christmas col- 
lects, more than Christmas anthems, more than Christmas ser- 
mons, more than white vestments of joy. 

Christmas means the birth of Jesus in our souls, the birth 
of the Christ of love, of the Christ of purity, of the Christ of 
truth, of the Christ of gentleness, of the Christ of forgiveness, 
of the Christ of beauty. 

This is the new birth for man, and from that hour he is 
truly a child of God. Then the Christmas bells will ring out a 
new and gladsome music of love triumphant in ourselves and in 
the world. 

The Christmas lesson is God's supreme gift, the gift of 
Himself to man. 

The world does not so much need the giving of our money 
or our sympathy as it needs and asks for the giving of ourselves, 
our life. 



FOLLOWING THE STAR 

EPIPHANY 

ON a tongue of rock which projects from the mountain side 
rises the imposing terrace of Persepolis. A magnificent 
stairway ascends on the western side recessed in an enormous 
bay, while the steps mount parallel to the wall itself. In cere- 
monies of state an advancing procession could ascend by one 
flight, defile before the platform, and descend by the opposing 
stairway. We can picture the pomp and splendor of the kings 
of ancient Persia. The vast ruins of palace, audience hall, and 
propylaea, with sculptured relief, stand as silent witnesses of 
the glory of an imperial dominion now gone forever. 

Here one starlit night twenty centuries ago a band of Magi, 
the priests of the Avesta faith, were looking heavenward to 
read the will of God in the star-spangled oriental sky. Their 
creed, with the single exception of Judaism, was the purest 
faith the world had yet known. 

Fire was their holy symbol, for whether in the tiny spark, 
or in the dazzling sun, or reflected in moon or star, it portrayed 
the purity, the truth, the wisdom, the omnipotence of God. 

Their sacred books brought hope and comfort, teaching 
them the clear discrimination between right and wrong, point- 
ing to the advent of a Deliverer, and promising eternal life, 
with reward for virtue and punishment for sin. 

The Lord of Wisdom was a Good Spirit striving contin- 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 17 

ually with the Power of Evil. Man was free to cooperate with 
Right or Wrong, and if he chose to ally himself with the former 
he had the joy of realization that he had done his part in ad- 
vancing the Kingdom of E-ighteotisness. 

This was a momentous choice, for it determined man's 
destiny. If he chose the Good, ministering angels aided him 
in the great search for God. If he chose the Bad, evil spirits 
led him further on in the realm of Evil. 

It is no wonder that this stupendous moral thought found 
expression in the lofty prayer, "Good thoughts, good words, 
good deeds." Such a prayer can fitly be the guiding motive of 
every human soul. 

As the Magi whose faith we have very briefly described 
were communing with the Infinite, beholding the revelation of 
His majesty in the silent Heaven, they saw a new star. 

What a wondrous sight it must have been to them, accus- 
tomed as they were to note the company of nightly stars in 
their rising and their setting. 

They might have said, "We have our sacred traditions and 
they are enough. We know not where the star may lead." They 
not only saw the star but determined to follow it. It led them 
away from their shrines. It led them beyond the confines of 
their native land. They followed it over rugged mountains and 
through trackless deserts. 

They must have asked many times, "Whither will it lead 
us? Are we not following a phantom? Is this not a delusion, 
a mere ignis fatuus, a will-o'-the-wisp?" Strong must have 
been the temptation for them to return to the sacred glories of 
their native land. 

But onward they went, the star always bright above their 
heads. We ask: "Where did it lead them?" It led tliem to 



18 CHRISTI IMAGO 

Bethlehem. It led them to the Saviour of the World. It led 
them to the Son of- God. 

What a lesson there is in this for our lives ! Truth calls us 
to follow. It is a new star in our firmament. We ask: 
"Whither will it lead us?" It leads us away from many of our 
prejudices and our preconceptions. We may feel afraid to fol- 
low, but that is the prompting of a weak and timid heart. We 
follow and we have to climb our mountains of struggle and pass 
through our deserts of doubt, but the bright star is ever before 
us and it will always lead us to God. 

That is the meaning of the Star of Bethlehem. 

At the opening of the St. Louis Exposition where were 
brought together from the great nations of the earth the latest 
achievements of science and art and letters, there were flashed 
in letters of fire before the eyes of the hushed multitude, as the 
great keynote of progress, these significant words: "Thou shalt 
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 

As we stand under the open sky, where the numberless worlds 
within our vision are but parts of an infinite system of worlds 
stretching into limitless space, let us think of God, the Infinite 
and Loving, the Father of the Universe, and pray that we may 
see a new star, that some new light may appear to our souls 
which will lead us a little closer to the boundless heart of the 
Eternal. 



THE ONE SHEPHERDING 

THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY 

OUK Saviour spoke of other sheep not of this fold which shall 
hear His voice, and be gathered into one shepherding under 
one Shepherd. 

The knowledge of God is implanted in each human soul. 
This conception is the voice of God in the heart. In this cham- 
ber we find a "holy of holies" where abides the very presence of 
our God. What a communion is this! The divine within us 
responding to the voice of God. 

The Hebrew nation regarded God as a national God. The 
Jews, as we well know, believed that the great Being who in- 
habiteth eternity could be shut up within the boundaries of a 
chosen race. 

Were the prayers in other lands unheeded by One who is 
equally and integrally present in this infinite universe? Did 
the great Being unconditioned by space and time limit His love 
by geographical confines? 

This spirit of national appropriation of God was common 
to the age. Each nation had its own individual deity. The 
Hindus hugged the gods of the Pantheon of their fathers. The 
Persian king again and again in his inscriptions expresses the 
belief that it is to the god of Persia to whom he owes his con- 
quests. 

Such a spirit of exclusion our Lord here condemns. He 



20 CHRISTI IMAGO 

who had come on earth to bear the load of humanity embraced 
the whole world in His loving arms. The Christ saw His own 
in the folds of nations far away and His loving heart declares : 
"Many sheep I have which are not of this fold." 

Our English authorized version does not do justice to the 
original. The Greek word rendered "fold" in the expression 
"not of this fold" signifies as the translation implies, "an en- 
closure," "a pen." But not so the word translated "fold" in 
tlie concluding phrase "one fold, one shepherd." In the latter 
case we have one of the most striking examples of etymological 
figures that we find in the Gospels. These figures are vocal pic- 
tures of the same root sound in two words. Hence there is 
established not only a connection of idea, but a concurrence of 
sound as well. Here we must translate "one shepherding" and 
"one shepherd." In this way the great Shepherd enters into 
such oneness with His sheep that the same root word is found 
in both. 

With the old translation before us, we see how the idea has 
given rise to much error. Easily might the conception be 
evolved from "one fold" that all religious truth was shut up in 
that little religious community to which an individual might 
belong. It is this spirit which is reflected in the enunciation of 
Rome, nulla salus extra Ecclesiam, "no salvation outside the 
(Eoman) fold." 

But what our Saviour means to declare is that He has come 
to tear down the walls of religious prejudice that all may be 
one in Him. Here is the picture of the divine shepherding: 
"After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man 
could number, of all nations and kindreds, and people, and 
tongues, stood before the throne." 

We call the ocean by many names, but it is all one sea — 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 21 

the same waters flow back and forth incessantly. So men may 
shut themselves in with their little preconceptions, but in the 
ocean of God's love they are all one shepherding. 

We want that Christian love which will rise above all pre- 
judice, that love which makes us all one in Christ, that love 
which wraps us all round about with a garment white and un- 
sullied by pride, a love which dedicates all to the service of God 
and humanity. 



GOD AND MAMMON 

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY 

ON the coins of Constantine was stamped on the one side tlie 
sacred Christogram and on the other the face of a Roman 
god. We may call that a curious blending of Christianity and 
paganism. 

And yet to-day we see the same type of mongrel Christ- 
ianity. How many dedicate a part of themselves to Christ, and 
the other part to self. They give a part of life to prayer and 
praise and profession of Christ's name; but another part they 
give to greed, avarice, passion, jealousy. 

Religion must dominate the whole man. It is not a mere 
part of life; it is the entire life. If one portion lies outside of 
its sway and influence, religion to that life is a mechanical and 
artificial thing superinduced upon it, but not synonomous with 
it. Faith may find expression in formulas, but these formulas 
are not faith. Faith is life and the exhibition of life is a revela- 
tion of faith. Do you ask me: "Have I faith?" Rather ask 
me if my life is a continuous and progressive communion with 
God. 

The traveler sees with wonder the host of pilgrims stopping 
before the holy image of St. Peter at Rome and kissing the feet 
of the rude, bronze statue. In the throng we see old men, 
women, and even tiny children, who have to be lifted up that 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 23 

their baby lips may touch the Saint We see the rich and the 
poor, the aristocrat and the peasant. 

Smile we may, a contemptuous smile, at their superstition, 
but if their worship be sincere, it is acceptable to Him who reads 
the thoughts of the heart. 

We don't know whether Leo the Great altered over an 
ancient statue of Jupiter Capitolinus to stand here as the 
Prince of the Apostles, or not. If so, we might exclaim: "a 
Paganized Christianity indeed." But a thousand times more 
inconsistent than joining Peter and Jupiter is that life which 
gives homage to our divine Lord while beneath in the secrets of 
the heart self is enthroned, while under the fair robe of pro- 
fessions of devotion to the saintly life of our Redeemer the 
soul is filled with hate, impurity, and meanness. 

The Italian peasant adores what Holy Church has given 
him and, I doubt not, receives a blessing, but the worldling 
reveres the Christ of holiness and love, while the heart devoted 
to the lower self drags the soul downward, making it the ser- 
vant of the passion which reigns there. 

"Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." God demands our 
entire consecration to love and service. How little we know of 
the great heart of Christ! It was seeing the sorrows of man- 
kind, it was being among the poor, the outcast, it was His keen 
discernment, coming from His divine nature, of the inequali- 
ties, the burden, the despair, the degradation, the shame of 
humanity, which broke the Christ heart. This is truly vicarious 
suffering. 

We have sympathy, yes, when our friends are in trouble. 
But Christianity is not simply interest in ourselves and in our 
friends. Christianity is world sympathy. 

Often in New York, as I passed through the slums of the 



24 CHRISTI IMAGO 

city, and saw crawling out of the heated tenement house a 
squalid child, and as I beheld on the faces of men the marks of 
vice and degradation, I have thought how the grass and flowers 
in country lawn, the blue hills, the running brook show God's 
beauty, and I have asked myself: "Is it that here in man is 
God's image?" God sees it, and he sees it most who comes 
closest to God. 

We love to speak of the divine Christ and we hope to enter 
into His divinity, but before we can come near to the divine in 
Christ, we must come near to the divine in humanity. Here is 
where we shall behold Him. "As ye did it unto the least of 
these, ye did it unto Me." 



THE POWER OF VISION 

THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY 

mAN refines the speculum of the telescope and myriads of 
new worlds are revealed to the eye. Yet those worlds 
were there before man apprehended them. 

How many fail to see the beauty of God revealed in all 
about us. There is the beauty of the morning when nature 
seems to rejoice in the birth of another day. There is the a-wful- 
ness of the storm and the somber gloom of the starless night. 

The majestic pomp of worlds which bend over us in the 
twinkling light tells us that our God watches over His creation. 
The petal of the daisy speaks of Infinite care, the singing bird 
of a Heavenly Father's love. 

All this is revelation. All this is a vision of God. 

The greater our capacity to feel, to see, to know, the greater 
the revelation to us of an Infinite God. It is true that sensa- 
tion is but the quivering of a nerve or the vibration of a muscle, 
yet this is our medium of communication with the outside 
world, and the more delicate the organism the greater the ap- 
preciation. 

Imagine a man confined in a closed room all his life. He 
sees but the narrow walls of his dungeon. What would a de- 
scription of God's blue sky or the vision from the mountain 
top mean to him? He has never seen the strength and majesty 
of the everlasting hills. 



26 CHRISTI I^IAGO 

So to the man shut in by his own prejudices, by his own 
preconceptions, by his own littleness, what vision comes of the 
boundless heart of the Eternal God? 

Does he who has never seen the ocean know the roar and 
boundlessness of the sea? 

Does he who has never looked on the face of Christ know 
Christian love, service, sacrifice? 

One has defined refinement as the capacity to enjoy and to 
suffer. 

To enjoy the bliss of Heaven we must realize the divine joy 
of suffering. 

How many failures in life are due to lack of vision or 
wrong perspective. "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out and 
cast it from thee." 

We fail to see the vital and essential, and consequently we 
so magnify the unessential that life is seen in distorted pro- 
portion. 

The soul should rise above earth and catch the vision from 
the skies. 

An eagle was captured and placed in the same coop with 
the hens. The boys said, "He roosts and sleeps with them and 
he has been associated with them so long that he thinks he is 
a hen." One day they let him out and for a while the eagle 
pecked the corn proudly and disdainfully. The day had been 
overcast, but suddenly the sunlight burst through the clouds. 
Then the eagle spread his grey wings and soared high into the 
blue ether until he became a speck smaller than a sparrow. He 
knew he was an eagle for he saw God's sunlight. 

So our souls can soar when they receive the vision, when 
they realize their divinity. Never can a true soul rest until it 
reaches up to God. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 27 

Life grows in proportion to what we see and appropriate. 
The opalescent hues of sunset, the cloud shadows on the hills, 
the delicate fragrance of the flowers, are revealing God to the 
human soul. The immutable laws of the universe, the ethnic 
progress through the years, the aspiration to attain the divine 
ideal, point us to the Infallible with which life must be in per- 
fect harmony. 

The power of vision comes through discipline. One sees 
only a rude stone by the roadside. Another sees the creeping 
vine which conceals its roughness and irregularities, making it 
a thing of beauty, and he departs with a vision of the beautiful 
in his soul. Another tears away the ivy growth and picks out 
letter after letter and syllable after syllable an old inscription 
till he has restored a record of the past long hidden from the 
human eye. He departs but he carries with him the vision of 
the truth. If life is to learn how God is speaking in the great 
world about us, the eye must be clear. 

Pride and bigotry cannot behold truth. Hate and greed 
cannot behold love. We have found the Christ only when we 
have perceived with undimmed eye the qualities which He 
reveals. 

When we accept Christ, we take these qualities into our 
life. So it is that divinely but naturally the soul is transfigured 
into the likeness of God. 



CHRISTIAN GROWTH 

SEPTUAGESIMA 

TN the graphic metaphor, "I am the vine, ye are the branches," 
Jesus forcefully portrays the organic and spiritual union 
between Himself and His followers. 

It clearly and unequivocally teaches (and the teaching is the 
teaching of Jesus Himself) that our religion is the growing life 
of God in the human soul. Christ is the vine ; we are the branches, 
dependent upon the life of the vine and partaking of its nature. 

Christ's figure is very plain; it shows us that Salvation is 
a growth ; and since it is a growth, it must be a gradual process, 
a daily evolution, a union of life with the divine source of life. 
Its increasing development is in proportion to and conditioned 
by the individual capacity to receive the life of Jesus. 

How natural is the growth of the branches, the tender 
shoot, the weak twig, the vigorous bough. 

So the Christian life is the normal and natural unfolding. 

The life of the vine is in the branches; the life of Christ 
must be in the human soul. 

The divineness of the natural and the naturalness of the 
divine is a reassuring thought, for it teaches the sacredness of 
daily life. 

Were our food sent by the ravens or in a sheet let down 
from heaven, it would be no more a miracle than the planting 
of the seed, the growing corn, and the ripening fruit that yields 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 29 

our harvests. It is true that, "God's in His heaven, all's well 
with the world," but it is equally true that God's in the world, 
all's well with the world; or as the Apostle puts it, "In Him we 
live and move, and have our being." He is nearer to us than 
the sense of touch, or taste, or sound. 

If religion is the life of God in the human soul, and if this 
life be the natural growth, we do well to ask what are those 
divinely ordered laws in accord with which the life must be in 
perfect harmony. 

First, expansion. Watch the tree as it unfolds. It drinks 
the sunlight and the dew into its existence. It sends forth its 
leaves, its blossoms, its buds, its fruitage. The snows of winter 
may have rested on its head. Storms and winds may have 
shaken it so that it has almost bent before opposing forces, but 
all have served to make it strong. 

So the religious man is like a tree "planted by the rivers 
of water." 

Second, receptivity. Without light there can be no physical 
growth. The tree deprived of the life-giving rays of the sun is 
dwarfed and stunted. So is human life if it does not receive 
the light of God. 

When God reveals scientific law, the revelation does not 
come to the Fiji Islander or to the Hottentot but to the scientist 
in his study who has patiently toiled to come nearer the God of 
Truth. 

So the life grows in proportion as it is open to receive the 
God of Love and the God of Beauty. 

Third, struggle. If Fichte is right in his definition of sin 
that it is persistence in past relations, then every step of our 
development must be marked by emancipation. We must free 



30 CHRISTI IMAGO 

ourselves from that which would check our natural growth as 
the vine frees itself from choking weeds. 

The blade of grass which grows on yonder lawn has fought 
its way in the struggle of plant life and has earned the right 
to grow there. We look into the faces of some of God's saints 
and we see written that serenity and strength which mark the 
triumph in the struggle over temptation and trial. 

Fourth, faith. We see the tendril of a vine feeling its way 
upward as if guided by an unseen hand until it towers above 
the arbor and comes into the sunlight of God's heaven. We 
see a soul raised heavenward above the clouds of sorrow. This 
mysterious force we call instinct in the tendril; but in man 
we call it faith. It is a power that never deceives. How care- 
ful we must be to develop this part of our natural life, for it 
is specially responsive to culture. Without it life is mean- 
ingless and dead. 

When we have thus made ourselves, through God working 
in us and through us, strong, heroic, trustful men and women, 
we have a life which effects in us a character like unto Christ 
Himself, a life the realization of which is absolute harmony 
and perfect fellowship with God. 

This is the salvation which Jesus brought, union with 
Himself, the life of the vine and the branches. 



THE DIVINE IN MAN 

SEXAGESIMA 

CHE laws of light are the same, so science teaches us, 
whether of the sun in the heavens or the smallest ray that 
pierces the attic window. 

Why? Because the sunbeam proceeds from the sun and 
partakes of its nature. 

So the laws of the divine in us, the laws of God in the soul, 
are the same as the laws of the Universal Father, because we 
are children of God. 

Otherwise there would be one standard of justice, of truth, 
of holiness for man, and another for God. As Emerson says, 
"When we discern truth, or justice, etc., we do nothing of our- 
selves but allow a passage of its beams." 

True life is God's life in the soul. Violation of the law of 
the divine is the dethronement of God within ourselves, the 
mastery of the lower over the higher self, the triumph of the 
brute over the spiritual. 

Religion is a thing of life, a nearness to God to such a 
degree that we are conscious always of the divine presence in 
the soul. The world is not like the top which the boy winds 
up and sets spinning. The machinist makes a great machine 
and in a certain sense the machine reflects the thought of the 
builder, but the machinist does not act in and through the 



32 CHRISTI IMAGO 

machine. It can and does run independently of him. God 
does not guide the world like that. 

The old teleological argument compared creation to a watch 
the arrangement of which must imply an intelligent maker. 
But the watch is wound and acts without the maker. God does 
not rule the world like that. 

The musician strikes the strings of the harp. The music 
may be beautiful, but the harp is not the musician, and its 
strings are useless till touched by trained fingers. 

God does not merely superintend the world, but He is in 
the world. 

The soul survives the body, yet while it is in the body it is 
master of the body. We act and think, but it is the soul act- 
ing and thinking through and in our hands and brains. 

Creation is the outward manifestation of God in it. The 
beautiful is beautiful because God is in it. The perfect is 
perfect because God is in it. Service is service because God 
is there. Truth is truth because God is there. Love is love 
because God is there. Human life is divine because God is in 
it. Christ does not tell us that we shall see God in metaphys- 
ical speculations about Him, but He does plainly declare, 
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

The vision of the pure in heart sees the divine in our- 
selves, and sees it in others. It is so easy to see the bad in 
human life. Christianity is seeing the good which comes from 
the divine in the heart of man. We may ridicule some types of 
posthumous honors. We regard as oriental folly China's con- 
ferring of the title "Earl of the First Class" on the Viceroy of 
Nankin after his death. But do we not act likewise? How 
often we fail to show our appreciation of a man until after he 
has gone from us, and how quick we are to strew honors and 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 33 

encomiums upon his grave! Of what value are these to him 
now, for it was in the toil, the pain, the struggle of daily life 
that he needed most our sympathy, our love, our help. 

Let us not see the divine in man only when life is ended. 
It is true that the really great are those who embrace the largest 
part of humanity within their love. The nearer one comes to 
God the more of the divine he sees in man. The brotherhood 
of man in Christ is the brotherhood of the divine within our- 
selves. 

Christ did not reveal Himself simply to show us what 
righteousness is or what God is, but to show men how they 
could be righteous, how they could be like God. He did not come 
with a message of despair but with a message of hope. If a 
man of physical prowess should show to incurables the strength 
of sinew and muscle, he would carry to them nothing but dis- 
appointment. 

Christ came not only to reveal perfect righteousness but 
to show how we can become righteous. He came not only to 
reveal God in man but to show us how our divine life is to 
grow until we become like Him. 



GOD'S SYMPATHY 

QUINQUAGESIMA 

TT|E speak of omniscience and omnipotence as attributes of 
%f^ God which are beyond our comprehension. But the at- 
tribute of God which is more real to us is His Infinite Sym- 
pathy. God is not only over us but in us. 

Every selfish act or thought mars the divine in us. Every 
impurity stains the glory of God in man. 

There is no sin committed that does not pain the heart of 
God as only Infinite Love can know. 

In every grief we have God grieves more. 

Our every joy brings greater joy to the Father's heart. 

Why? Because our life is God's life and God's life is our 
life. 

The child is like the father, and by this aflSnity of nature 
what is the child's pain or joy is in a larger sense the father's 
also. 

How admirably is this illustrated in that highest example 
of the Bhodian art, the famous Laocoon statue. 

We note that the expression on the faces of the sons, 
agonized though it is, does not compare with the deeper pain 
on the father's face. 

Why? Because the father is thinking not of himself but 
of the suffering of his children. 

In the matchless Niobe group at Florence we see the same 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 35 

conception of the artist. The right hand embraces a child 
while the left is raised as if the mother herself would receive 
the fatal stroke intended for her children. 

The chisel of the sculptor has carved in marble the noblest 
and tenderest emotion of the human soul, the heart's agony for 
those we love. 

Pain at the suffering of others is keener than suffering 
ourselves. 

So God's love could not be completely revealed without the 
sacrifice of Calvary. 

Here we see the Infinite Love suffering that God may 
suffer for us and with us. 

We can estimate human woe, but we can never begin to 
understand the divine sorrow of the Christ heart. 

We should do well to think more and more on the Infinite 
Sympathy of Jesus. Are we misunderstood? There is One 
who was more misunderstood. Are we sorrowful? There is 
One who sorrowed infinitely more than we. Are we tempted? 
There is One who was more tempted, yet without sin. 

He became the Captain of our Salvation because He was 
made perfect through suffering. He bids us not "go," but 
"come, follow after Me," and though the way be rough and 
steep we know that He has trodden every step before us. 

How broad this thought makes our comprehension of 
Christ's love! 

Every sigh of His children, every aspiration of the human 
heart, every longing directed heavenward, even in ignorance 
and superstition, must reach the throne of the Infinite. 

In the Turkish mosque of St. Sophia in Constantinople, 
once a Christian church, in the half dome above where the old 
altar stood, there is to be seen through coats of gilding, by 



36 CHRISTI IMAGO 

which the Turks have endeavored to cover the sacred picture, 
the huge mosaic outline of the form of Christ Himself. 

There it stands to-day, a halo of glory on His head, His 
hands spread in benediction. 

As the Mohammedan kneels with his face toward Mecca, 
and calls upon the Prophet and the God of the Prophet, still 
the benediction of our Saviour, dimly seen through arabesque, 
is over his head though he knows it not. 

So I believe that in every prayer, in every longing for 
God, in every crying out unto the Infinite Love, however dark 
the superstition, however crude the form, however dim the un- 
derstanding, yet through the darkness and the blindness there 
would be seen, if mortal eyes could only see, the form of our 
Lord Himself blessing His child. 

The Christ heart must be so because it is the Christ Heart. 



THE ARISTOCRACY OF SERVICE 

FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT 

TW CERTAIN wealthy church was described as be-ing the 
Jf most aristocratic and exclusive church in the city. 

Is such a thing possible as an exclusive Christian church — 
an exclusive body of Christ, who died for the outcast, the poor, 
the degraded — an exclusive fellowship of sons of God, of broth- 
ers in Christ? 

To be a Christian is to have the inclusiveness of Christ 
which embraced all men, for unless we have the spirit of Christ 
we are none of His. 

Christianity is the Christ love for humanity in the human 
soul. 

Christianity is to feel as Christ felt, to sympathize as 
Christ sympathized, to love as Christ loved. 

With such a spirit of Christ nothing can be more incon- 
sistent than exclusiveness. 

What does exclusiveness mean? It means shutting out 
from ourselves God's great family, shutting out from ourselves 
a love for humanity, sympathy for the outcast, pity for the dis- 
tressed — the opportunities for divine service. 

It means shutting ourselves in to our narrowness and self- 
ishness, to our littleness, to our desires and pleasures, to our 
mortality. 

We cannot shut out without shutting in. 



38 CHRISTI BL\GO 

So it is that we are shut in from the divine love for hu- 
manity, from the Christ heart, from the peace of service, from 
the keen discrimination of things eternal, from the world vision 
of our divine Lord. 

Do we realize that it is only those things that we give forth 
which are immortal? 

The more love we bestow, the more we have; the more hope 
we put forth, the more it grows; the more faith we place in 
what is true and real, the greater faith we have. 

Of what avail is knowledge unless it is given forth? 

The test of a man's power is the ability to serve. 

It is what we give out that makes success. 

If education creates a caste, then it has become a misnomer, 
for education is the drawing out of our powers into the capacity 
for service. 

If wealth creates class distinction whereby men through 
pride and arrogance cut themselves off from real and genuine 
fellowship with all humanity, then it becomes a curse to its 
possessor. 

We ask why there is not deeper and more vital interest in 
spiritual things. 

Suppose every member of the Church of Christ went forth 
into the world as a real member of Christ's body, that he served 
as Christ served, loved as Christ loved, was as humble, as kind, 
as gentle, as true, as pure, as manly, as strong, that in his daily 
living he was a Christ in business, in the club, in the home, in 
all his relation to his fellows. 

Suppose all Christians vied with one another in Christian 
love and service, that, instead of debating over the origin of 
sin, all energy and power were directed to redeem the fallen 
and to show forth in the highest degree the spirit of Christ, that 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 39 

Christians at all times and in all places were willing to suffer 
as He suffered in the beauty of immortality and service, would 
not Christianity to-day be an irresistible power appealing to iJie 
highest and manliest sentiment in the human soul? 

Yes, we need an aristocracy, but not exclusiveness. 

We need the aristocracy of worth, and culture, and learn- 
ing — educated to service. 

We need the aristocracy of wealth consecrated to the 
alleviation of tlie poor and the suffering. 

The assurance of immortality lies in living the immortal 
life here, and the immortal life is the life of service. 

The opportunities of Heaven are the opportunities of ser- 
vice. 

The happiness of Heaven is the happiness of service. 

Our vision of God depends on our vision of service. 

Revelation is the realization of the glory of service. 

Jesus' highest joy was the joy of the cross. 

And so it is that love becomes the guarantee of immortality. 

"We know that we have passed from death unto life because 
we love the brethren." "He that loveth not his brother abideth 
in death." 

To love humanity is to love God. 

To serve is to be like God Himself. 

This is Christianity. 



THE JOY OF OUR LORD 

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT 

TT I HAT is the joy of our Lord ? It is the joy of sacrifice and 
\%f service, the joy of the Cross. "For the joy that was set 
before Him He endured the cross." 

The only abiding joy is the joy which comes through sacri- 
fice. The humble laborer toils that he may make a happy home 
for wife and children. It is the joy of service. The daughter 
sits by the bedside of the invalid mother and through the long 
watches of the night she ministers in loving attentions. It is 
the joy of service. The scholar denies pleasure and devotes 
long and weary hours to truth. It is the joy of sacrifice. 

We must distinguish between joy and pleasure. 
Pleasure is sensuous and as fleeting as the emotions. 
Joy is spiritual and is as eternal as the human souL 
The greater the joy, the greater the sacrifice. 

We can't live selfish lives here and at death be fitted to 
enter into the joy of our Lord. Day ])y day we partake of that 
joy by loving service, by self-renunciation, by bearing the cross 
of sacrifice, and this daily living is preparing us for the bene- 
diction : "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." 

Are my prayers for my selfish interests? Christ's prayers 
were for others and for strength and help to serve others. Do 
I believe my creed simply because it is a comfortable and easy 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 41 

way to save my own soul? Christ's faith found its full ex- 
pression in absolute sacrifice. Christian manhood demands that 
we think less about being saved and more about being saviours. 
We may tell men about our divine Saviour, about His love and 
sacrifice. But men must see the Saviour's love and sacrifice re- 
vealed in our own lives. 

We may cry out that we are so vile and sinful, but that 
wail is never going to save the world. Is it Christianity that 
we should continue Christian invalids? No, Christianity is 
life, and the Christed life means that we are growing more and 
more into a vigorous and robust and virile Christian character, 
fitted to serve as Jesus served. 

The entrance into the joy of Christ is more possible for the 
poor laborer who consecrates his small earnings to the happiness 
of the little family he serves than for the rigid legalist who 
may have his pew in the Christian Church, and yet pays to a 
human soul a starving wage for the long labor of the day, and 
advances his social position and his wealth through the oppres- 
sion of the poor. He may strive in this way for what he thinks 
is abiding happiness, but at the last he will discover that he has 
made a big mistake. 

The supreme choice of life is the choice between joy and 
pleasure, between sacrifice and selfishness. 

The Greek word for joy carries with it the idea of renuncia- 
tion. We must give up something to enter higher joy. I have 
often seen on the Greek sepulchral monuments the word chaire 
"farewell." It was spoken as friend parted with friend. It was 
the last word whispered in the ear of the dying. Its other mean- 
ing was strangely antithetic. It became a word of gladness and 
hope ; chaire "rejoice." After all we see in it an epitome of life. 
The mother would keep her babe that she may feel the tender 



42 CHRISTI IMAGO 

pressure of its little hand upon her cheek. The entrance into 
boyhood brings chaire "farewell" to mother's earlier care, but 
"rejoice" for the stronger life. The youth enters school or col- 
lege, and painful is the farewell to the shelter of the old home, 
but sadness brings the greater joy of the promise of larger prep- 
aration. Commencement brings the valedictory, "farewell" to 
hallowed associations, but "rejoice" because the life goes out 
into the busy world to serve, to help and to bless. 

When life draws to its close and loved ones stand about 
our bed, there comes again the same old word, chaire "farewell," 
but may the chaire "farewell" be in its sublimest sense the 
chaire "rejoice"; "Enter into the joy of thy Lord," the joy of 
immortal love, service and self-denial ! 



THE UPLIFTED CHRIST 

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT 

fl|ESUS says, "If I be lifted up I will draw all men unto Me." 
I Why is it that all men have not been drawn to the infinite 
love of our Redeemer? It is because the Christ which we are 
holding up to them is the Christ of our own pattern. We are 
holding up the likeness of ourselves in place of Christ. We 
are holding up the Christ of our narrow conceptions, the Christ 
of the religionist, the Christ of the philosopher, the Christ of 
the sentimentalist, and men turn away. No, it is not the Christ 
they turn from, but our little perverted image of the Christ. 
Ah, if Christians would hold up the Christ of truth, the Christ 
of love, the Christ of sacrifice, the Christ of manliness, every 
God-sent soul would respond. 

In the uplifted Christ we see the great loving heart of God. 
That is what the world is longing for. A little child said to 
her father, "The road is so steep and the night is so dark I 
fear I cannot hold your hand." The father smiled and answered, 
"You don't have to hold my hand, my child; I will hold your 
hand." So God speaks to us and to all His children. But if 
God holds our hand. He leads us in the steps of our divine 
Saviour, and if we follow, then we shall surely hold up to the 
world His love and sacrifice. The holy pattern as revealed in 
our lives will be unmarred by selfishness, littleness, or meanness. 
The highest joy of life is in Christly service. It is said 



44 CHRISTI IMAGO 

that there was a poor laborer of London who ministered to his 
invalid wife. He told the physician the simple story of his 
daily life, how he arose early in the morning and attended to 
all the needs of the sick before going to the hard labor of the 
day, how he came home at noon and prepared the midday meal, 
how at night every duty was joyous with love as he arranged 
the pillows and made everything bright and cheerful about the 
room. "For," he said, "I promised I'd love her, comfort her, 
honor her, keep her, in sickness and in health. I've tried to 
and we've been so happy. Sir, love does it all. You'll want to 
comfort her, you'll have to honor her, and if sickness comes 
you'll love her all the more." A sob and tearstained eyes told 
that she on the sick bed answered to every word. The humble 
workman placed his hand in hers as he said, "Sir, I can't wish 
for you better happiness than I have had. I wish for you as 
much, and I take it, I'm about the happiest man in London." 
Yes, he was right. No man could be happier, for he was hold- 
ing up the Christly love and service, and walking in His steps. 
Evei*y visitor to Rome is interested in watching the crowd 
ascending the scala santa supposed to have been brought from 
Pilate's Judgment Hall. The faithful mount stair by stair on 
their knees and after reciting a prayer bend down and kiss the 
holy steps where Jesus walked. Yes, Christianity is to adore 
and to tread the foot-steps of the Saviour. But following the 
steps of Jesus is not kissing a marble slab — that were easy — but 
it means following the divine Master in sacrifice to humanity, 
following His steps as they trod the hot Judean sand in loving 
ministrations, following them as they went in daily duty how- 
ever humble, in prayer on the lonely mountain-side, in fasting 
in the desert, in struggle with temptation, in rebuking the 
proud and selfish and hypocritical. Yes, we are to follow those 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 45 

blessed feet as they went so weak and weary and suffering to 
nigged Calvary there to be pierced that humanity might realize 
a divine love, a divine sonship, incarnate in suffering. 

To hold up Christ to the world is to be a Christ with the 
Christ sympathy, with the Christ heart, with the Christ love, 
with the Christ vision, with the Christ renunciation, with the 
Christ sorrow, with the Christ peace, with the Christ courage, 
with the Christ loyalty to truth, with the Christ forgiveness — in 
one word, with the Christ manhood. 



THE SCHOOL OF THE CROSS 

FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT 

TW FEW summers ago I had the privilege of visiting Ober- 
Jf ammergau and witnessing the Kreuzesschule, or the Les- 
son of the Cross, reproduced for the first time since 1875. Nine 
living pictures from the famous Passion Play were introduced 
into this drama. 

I find that the sacred tragedy which these humble peasants 
enact every ten years becomes a real part of their lives. Even 
the most casual traveler notices a hallowed and sweetened in- 
fluence pervading the entire community. 

I visited Anthon Lang, who takes the part of Christ. I 
went into his workshop where he practises his lowly trade as a 
potter and wood carver. We sat together upon a bench and 
talked about the life of the villagers. Some little boys passed 
wearing long hair, and I asked for an explanation of this cus- 
tom. The answer was, "These children are being raised up to 
take our places when we are gone. This boy is to be the Christ 
some day; another, the Apostle Paul." 

And I thought what a beautiful idea that little children 
from their earliest years should be raised up to be Christs. 
Their life must become in its unfolding more like the great pat- 
tern they imitate. 

In the afternoon of the sacred drama I saw these same 



THE CHPxISTED LIFE 47 

villagers whom I had learned to love gathered about the table 
enacting the solemn scene of the Last Supper. I saw Anthon 
Lang hanging on the cross, portraying the tremendous sacrifice 
of Calvary. The scene was transcendently impressive, not on 
account of the acting, which was inferior to our highest artistic 
standards, but because the lives of the actors were in harmony 
with the spirit of the solemn events presented. 

But suppose in my visit to this quiet village I had observed 
a spirit of greed, selfishness, jealousy, slander, backbiting, which, 
alas! so frequently is found in communities called Christian, 
would not the sacred scenes of the drama have been a parody 
on the lesson of Calvary? What does the name "Christian" 
mean? Is not its full significance an acting the part of Christ 
in the world ? Does it not mean life's manifestation of the for- 
giveness and love of Christ? Was not the Church of God in- 
stituted to be simply the continuous and increasing revelation 
of the spirit and life of its divine Founder? 

The Greeks called him who was acting on the stage a part 
different from his own personality hypoTcrites — a word which has 
given us our grievously suggestive term, hypocrite. 

And yet, how many, very often unconsciously, in prayer, 
praise, and profession, are acting out a part not really vital to 
themselves! Alas, the bickerings over creed, formulas, and 
polity which for centuries have disgraced the followers of 
Christ! Alas, the rivalry, jealousy, and lust for power among 
those who profess to show to the world the image of our Lord ! 
Christianity is to be a Christ in the home, in business, in so- 
ciety, in the Church of God. It is nothing more than this, and 
certainly it is nothing less. May the great lesson of our re- 
sponsibility come home to us, that, like the peasants of this 
humble Bavarian village, we who bear the name of Christ have 



48 CHRISTI IMAGO 

this solemn part to play in Christlike ministrations to the poor 
and the outcast and the degraded! 

We are justly proud of the history of the Church of Christ, 
but our pride should not be in the wealth and culture of her 
communicants, in the beauty of church architecture, in the 
grandeur of the ritual, but in that great number of Christ-like 
lives which have gone forth to bless the world, to give comfort 
to the sorrowing, strength to the weak, and balm to the suf- 
fering. 

Far greater is the company of those who have been called 
home than of those who remain, and if the departed are per- 
mitted to share in the joys of those who were near and dear to 
them in this life, we must believe that a great company which 
no man can see is watching over us and inspiring us for greater 
service. 

The cross which adorns our altars often bears many jewels, 
the pious offerings of self-denial. So our acts of love and ser- 
vice form the rich gems of our cross of sacrifice which will 
sparkle forever in the brightness of the eternal city. 



THE ANNUNCIATION 

FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION 

T REMEMBER a glorious dawn which I witnessed on the day 
of the Feast of the Annunciation at Girgenti, the ancient 
Agrigentum in Sicily. I had opened the shutters of our room 
which overlooked the great valley below, and before me from the 
height of a thousand feet above the sea stretched one of the 
grandest panoramas I had ever seen. 

Below the hill spread out the soft azure blue of the Mediter- 
ranean as delicate in coloring as the cloudless sky in summer 
at early sunrise. The moon was hanging over the waters while 
the valley was lying in darkness. Soon the rays of the sun 
shot up from the east, reflecting soft tints of saffron on the 
western sky above the hills and crossing the valley with bands 
of yellow light which gradually deepened into richer shades. 
The vale suddenly grew brighter while the mountain shadows 
projected far within. Almost before we could follow them the 
colorings had changed their tints and the hues upon the waters 
increased in luster from the pale blue to more vivid purple 
until the sea began to sparkle and the sun arose, filling with its 
golden light the whole valley. 

Now we could see distinctly the magnificent Greek temples 
at our feet whose silent columns told of a faith centuries before 
Christ was born. 

The deep-toned Cathedral bell began to ring. Its labored 
notes were drowned by the clanging of smaller bells from little 
shrines, all this shrill chorus being echoed among the hills. 



50 CHRISTI IMAGO 

It was the morning of the Feast of the Annunciation and 
all nature was sharing in the joyful message. The ruined tem- 
ples, sad and somber in the deep valley, spoke of a worship 
which was dead. The bells were ringing in the tidings of the 
coming of the Sun of Righteousness. 

So on the ruins of our dead past, with all our failures, with 
all our shattered hopes, with all our broken ideals, with all our 
dark sin, may there dawn from the skies the divine life touched 
by the glory of God Himself. 

If we are really Christians, our souls will become bright 
with the splendor of Heaven. God did not reveal Himself to 
the world and then cease. He did not speak and then still His 
voice forever. He was once incarnate, but He did not there- 
after cease to dwell in man. 

The light of God is in the world to-day more than ever be- 
fore. Emmanuel, "God with us," is as true to-day as when our 
Saviour walked the earth. He speaks to us as clearly as He 
did through the prophets of old unto His people. Humanity 
through the incarnate Christ is being made more and more the 
habitation of the divine, that God, as our Redeemer prayed, may 
glorify it with the same glory wherewith He glorified Jesus 
Himself. 

Let us never for a moment lose sight of this great funda- 
mental trutli. It is our hope and inspiration, the supreme pur- 
pose of our daily living, to reveal God's glory. 

Christ did not come into the world simply to show us what 
incarnate righteousness was, or how God could become man. 
While this was supremely necessary. He does not stop there, but 
He points us to His divine example and shows us how man can 
become like God. 

There is no resemblance between the acorn and the oak; 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 51 

the oak cannot become the acorn, but the acorn can become 
the oak. 

So man under a transforming power as gradual, as imper- 
ceptible, as natural, can become Christlike. 

Does the light of God illumine our souls, dispelling error, 
hate, and ignorance, and filling them with divine glory which 
we reflect? 



THE JOY OF THE CROSS 

PALM SUNDAY 

TOR the joy that was set before Him, He endured the Cross." 
The joy of the cross is the joy of sacrifice. We place the 
cross high on heaven-pointing spire, and it casts its shadow on 
the city street. Hurrying throngs pass over it, and how little 
they realize the lesson which it brings. Frivolous women wear 
it as a gilded bauble about their neck; they jest and indulge in 
small talk and perhaps even speak evil of another. How little 
they know of the lesson of the cross. 

Recently I had charge, during the summer, of a New York 
parish, and there came a knock on the office door late in the 
afternoon. I found there a poorly dressed woman who asked 
me to respond immediately to a case of destitution and sick- 
ness. I asked her why she had come, and this was her answer, 
"I was told to go until I saw a church which had a cross on it, 
and if I appealed there for help I would not be turned down." 
I thought how unwittingly, but how truly, the woman had given 
the profound meaning of the cross. It says to humanity, "Come 
to Me, all ye who are in sorrow and blindness and despair and 
sin, and I will lift you to the skies." The joy of the cross must 
be our joy before we can enter the bliss of heaven. 

The philosophers have many theories as to how to attain 
happiness. The statement of Aristotle is most concise and true. 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 53 

He defines happiness as a state, not a condition, an internal 
thing, and not external. He clearly differentiates between hap- 
piness and pleasurable sensations. Such sensations form no 
real part of life, and when their succession is broken or man be- 
comes surfeited, all joy is at an end. Happiness is life, and to 
imagine the addition of happiness to an already perfect life, is 
just as impossible as to imagine the addition of health to an 
already healthy body. If my body is sound I don't have to go to 
a sanitarium in search of health, for my perfect physical condi- 
tion is health. So if life is sound, we do not have to search for 
happiness, because indeed life is happiness. Some one may 
ask, "What is ideal life?" and we point to the perfect life of 
Jesus. But the life of Jesus was the life of absolute self- 
renunciation and service. Therefore, true happiness is the hap- 
piness of sacrifice. It is the joy of the cross. 

It is related that one freezing winter night a poor woman 
wrapped the only covering which she had about her little child. 
As she lay dying some days later from exposure to the cold, she 
was asked if she had any request to make. She replied, "I have 
nothing to ask for myself, but — O my child, my darling child ! — 
will you not care for my child?" And with these words upon 
her lips her soul went into the beyond. Think you not that she 
heard Christ say, "He that loseth his life the same will save 
it"? What a refuge that mother's love must have found in the 
great loving heart of God ! That was the mother's joy, the joy 
of sacrifice, the joy of the cross. The more we enter into it, 
the more we enter into the joy of Christ. 

Quite recently we gathered on the night of Maundy Thurs- 
day on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem. We read in the 
light of the bright moon the solemn narrative of our Lord's 



54 CHRISTI IMAGO 

sufferings. There were wafted to us from a band of Christians 
not far off the words of the familiar hymn — 

"Nearer, my God, to Thee, 
Nearer to Thee, 
E'en though it be a cross 
That raiseth me." 

This was the spirit of Christ's prayer: "Thy will be done 
even though it be the Cross." I asked myself, "Do we really 
mean these words as we sing them ?" Suppose our Lord should 
say, "My child, you wish to come nearer to Me; I will give you 
the Cross"; what would be our answer? Would we say, "Not 
now, O God," or would we say, "I will bear the Cross and it 
will be my highest joy"? 

The agony was like the sweat of blood, but the victory was 
the victory of sacrifice. Could we now have looked upon the 
face of Christ, we should have seen it serenely tranquil. With 
calm voice He awakes His sleeping disciples and with firm step 
He meets His betrayer. Death had no terror, for the joy of the 
Cross had triumphed. 

To this joy Christ calls us ; and may we enter into this joy 
of our Lord ! But this joy is the joy of a God of Sacrifice. It 
is the joy of the Cross. 



RESURREXIT 

EASTER 

TN the Lateran Museum the Koman and the Christian sepul- 
chral inscriptions are strikingly grouped together. In the one 
we often read despair and anguish; in the other, resignation 
and faith. Even the casual visitor cannot fail to be deeply 
impressed, for he is standing where the old faith of Rome and 
Christianity are brought into marked antithesis. 

The majority of these early followers of our Lord were 
ignorant men. They huddled in fear in the subterranean vaults 
of the catacombs and laid their precious dead in these dismal 
corridors, not knowing how soon the sword of persecution might 
fall upon their own heads. It required the highest courage at 
such an epoch to be a follower of Christ. 

The Latinist is impressed with the scrawled characters and 
the misspelled words, yet amid the crude mortuary testimonials 
of the Christian dead we see the sacred symbols of our faith 
speaking more eloquently than grand panygerics. The rough 
stone with its barbarous Latinity tells of something which the 
Roman world knew not. 

Yes, the beautiful marble slabs taken often from the most 

costly mausoleums and containing proud Roman epitaphs give 

us a touching picture of a faith not founded upon the guarantee 

of immortality. 

■ Here is a fair example of dismal stoicism: "I have lived 



56 CHRISTI IMAGO 

as thou livest. Thou shalt die as I have died. Neither to you 
nor to me was it granted to be immortal." The light Epicurean 
vein is seen in the following: "While I lived, I lived. My play 
is ended. Soon yours will be. Farewell." A mother with soul 
angTiish laments : "0 relentless Fortune, who delightest in cruel 
death ! Why is my Maximus so suddenly snatched from me, he 
who lately used to be in my bosom ? Here is his tomb." 

Enough of this sad picture. We turn to read the rude 
Christian monuments : "He sleeps in Christ." What a world of 
meaning in this short sentence. How often has been sung over 
the graves of our beloved the familiar hymn, "Asleep in Jesus ! 
blessed sleep." We find such euphemisms for death as, "He 
is with the saints," "He is called by angels," "He will rise 
again," for Christ has risen. Such the message that came on 
that first Easter mom, and down through the centuries it has 
rolled like heavenly music. Loved ones gone join their voices 
in the "resurrexit." 

Why do we picture death with greedy and hungry look, 
with cruel and sunken eye, with grim and savage visage, with 
plumes of sable black plucked from the wings of night? We 
toll the bell and the measured sombre cadence falls upon our 
ears like clods upon the coffin. 

Is this consistent with belief in the risen Lord? Rather 
we should do as the Moravians. When one of their number 
dies the clear voice of the trombone, high in the belfry tower, 
wafts out over the air the notes of some sweet hymn. "Listen !" 
say the people. "Some one has gone home." Ah! that we 
might see with the eye of faith, not with the eye of sense. 
Then we should rejoice where now we are sad. 

The risen Christ means a present Christ. Both thoughts 
are of equal importance to our Christian life and faith. The 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE / 

religion of our Lord is founded not only on Llis resurrection, 
but also on the firm assurance of His abiding presence through 
all time. We may linger at the empty grave, yet fail to have 
in ourselves the risen life of an ever present Saviour. 

Richard Wagner used to say: "If I can keep my soul this 
day pure, untouched by pettiness, untainted by things which 
the world deems important, undiverted by fictitious values and 
standards, then I rise to life divine." 



THE LESSON OF THE RESURRECTION 

FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EASTER 

^ DIVINE Father near to each human soul, acting in and 
through the events of daily life, and a Risen Christ re- 
vealing God's nature to us through our personal communion 
with Him ! This is the Easter triumph. 

Modern Christian criticism may discuss, as it is now doing, 
the historical and quasi-phj^siological problem as to whether 
the Risen Christ had a "material body spiritualized" or a "spir- 
itual body materialized," whether His actual flesh and blood 
came forth from the grave, as the gospel narrative most dis- 
tinctly gives us to understand, or whether He bore that celestial 
and incorruptible body which St. Paul declares is the body of 
the resurrection. Yet we need have no fear that the conclu- 
sion — if one ever be reached in the future — will affect that vital 
truth on which our Christian faith has been grounded for nine- 
teen centuries. 

The lesson of the Resurrection is purely a personal and 
individual one. We do well to ask ourselves soberly and seri- 
ously what that lesson is. Like all divine truths it is won- 
drously simple, yet deeply significant and full of transcendent 
responsibility. It means nothing less than such life-union with 
Christ as to effect in us a participation in His immortal and 
divine character — assuredly no easy process, but the struggle 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 59 

and achievement of a life in constant touch and fellowship 
with Him. 

The lesson of Easter plainly tells us that we must die to 
our selfish selves, to our littleness, narrowness, pride and hate, 
and rise to the eternal life of service. 

No Easter triumph can come to any soul without first a 
Golgotha of individual sacrifice and self-renunciation. Heaven 
is no fit place or condition for a man who knows not what 
service is. 

The risen Christ reveals the immortality of love realized 
in the soul of man, a conception briefly summarized by our 
Lord in the seeming paradox, "He that saveth his life shall lose 
it, and he that loseth his life, the same shall save it." 

The risen Christ reveals the immortality of truth. The 
self-opinionated whose prejudices and preconceptions shut out 
honest inquiry cannot commune with a God of truth. The 
revelation of Christ was the revelation of truth, and intellectual 
integrity is the liberty of every son of God: "Ye shall know 
the truth and the truth shall make you free." 

The risen Christ reveals the immortality of service. The 
divine activity is continually self-giving. God is forever show- 
ing the divineness of service. This is the life of God and it is a 
uniform, inflexible and eternal law that we must enter Into 
such a life before we can approach the infinite ideal of hu- 
manity which reveals God. The flowers and starry heavens 
sing together because there is between them the affinity of show- 
ing God's beauty. But between a selfish soul and God there 
can be no communion. 

The risen Christ reveals what was central in the mind of 
God from eternity. This darling thought in divine evolution 
was the perfect humanity revealed in the Son of Man. We call 



GO CHKISTI IMAGO 

Christ our Lord, our King, our Master, and our God, and justly 
so, but the dearest title to Him and the one oftenest upon His 
lips is that of the Son of Man, because it shows what man can 
be in BDim and through Him. To that humanity we link our 
hopes of immortality, and we are confident they will not dis- 
appoint us. 

The lesson of Easter is simply this, that we live the im- 
mortal life here, the life of love, sacrifice, truth, beauty, and 
hope as revealed in Christ; that we enter into such individual 
fellowship with our Lord as to enable us to realize in Him the 
life of God, for He has said, "He that hath seen Me hath seen 
the Father"; that we appropriate His divine life expressed in 
the joy of self-denial, though it leads us to Calvary. 



THE PERMANENCE OF LIFE 

THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EASTER 

TT|E know that if the earthly house of this tabernacle were 
%f^ dissolved we have a building of God, a house not made 
with hands, eternal in the heavens." The apostle tells us after 
ages of human experience and in the light of Christian hope 
that we know of a building from God, everlasting in Heaven, 
that will supersede the earthly house of our sojourn. 

We feel that thought is so intimately bound up with the 
life of the brain that we sometimes ask: "Can consciousness 
survive when the physical functions of the brain cease?" 

On the hypothesis of what is known as the transmissive 
function, science declares that the survival of consciousness is 
possible and even probable. 

This hypothesis would surround us with a "mother sea of 
thought," which in theistic language we call God. It would 
show that the brain does not generate but rather transmits 
thought, coarsely or finely, as the organism be coarse or delicate. 

Some German psychologists postulate thought waves more 
subtile than those of sight or sound, which reach their highest 
crest in periods of mental activity and fall so as to become im- 
perceptible in moments of sleep. Yet every undulation — even 
those of which we are unconscious in sleeping hours — remains 
imperishably stamped upon the personality. 

The teaching of this school of psychology is pronounced in 



62 CHRISTI IMAGO 

its opinion of the permanence of identity. It teaches that every 
mental act, which has become a part of the soul's life, though 
it may be temporarily obscured, can never be lost. It is not a 
wonder we remember; the wonder is that we ever forget. 

It is related that a mother who had lost a son in manhood 
hired a famous artist to paint his likeness. 

The artist consented on condition that she provide him with 
portraits of her son in his several stages from babyhood to 
maturer years. 

When the picture was finished it portrayed in the center 
the mother holding her infant boy, while round in a circle were 
grouped representations of her dead in childhood, in youth, 
and in young manhood. 

"Ah," cried the mother, "how this brings back to me the 
child which I have lost!" 

"Madam," replied the artist, "it is not one child you have 
lost; in your son you have lost four children." 

The babe is just as much lost in the child, the child in the 
youth, the youth in the man, as when that life passed into the 
unseen. Yet there was something in the mother's heart which 
told her that in spite of change that which was the object of 
her affection was unchangeable. 

In the thoughtful language of Seneca, "We are daily 
dying; daily some part of life is taken from us. Even while 
we are increasing, life is decreasing; we have lost childhood, 
boyhood, youth. This very day which we are living we share 
with death. It is not the last grain of sand which drains the 
hour-glass but what has flowed out before. So our final hour 
does not bring death but only its consummation." 

Through all this dying and repairing we are the same. 

The scientific argument leads us to the verdict of evolu- 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 63 

tion. It tells us that from the rain of atoms and the sport of 
the fire mists, tlirough the measureless aeons of varying vegetable 
and animal life, on and on through stretches of space and time 
too vast for human thought up to the perfection of the human 
spirit made Christlike and divine, there was one central idea 
in the mind of God, conceived and brought forth in the travail 
of great elemental forces of the universe, at a cost of sacrifice 
and love stupendous beyond the power of mind to grasp, that 
we ourselves might he made like God. 

It tells us the meaning of sorrow, suffering, trial and death, 
how these are refining character till the divine in man is trans- 
figured into the likeness of Christ. 

This is the cost of a human soul and how infinitely precious 
it must be in God's sight. It is eternal like God Himself. Man 
is never so Godlike as when he suffers and serves. 

The Christed life of sacrifice is immortal. The more we 
enter into it the more we are building our "house not made with 
hands, eternal in the heavens." 



THE INCORRUPTIBLE CROWN 

THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EASTER 

CHE figure is the most forceful that the apostle could have 
used in writing to the Church at Corinth. In sight of this 
rich and luxurious city, within the Grove of Poseidon, were 
celebrated the Isthmian Games. The metaphor speaks of the 
victor's prize won in the Greek contests, the most splendid of 
which were the Olympian. We cannot appreciate the appro- 
priateness of the language until we enter somewhat into the 
true Greek spirit. Let us briefly describe the ancient sanctuary 
of Olympia. 

■We alighted at the little village of Druva and ascending 
on foot a rather steep hill looked down upon the scene of desola- 
tion before us. Here and there was standing a broken pillar, 
while all about were columns lying in fragments thrown down 
by some vast upheaval, as if a mighty wind had mown down 
great trees of the forest. 

Up to the time of the German excavations the sacred valley 
was covered to a depth of twelve to fifteen feet. Time had 
spread a mantle of earth over the spot, and flowers and trees 
grew where once victors were crowned with the priceless olive. 

We could easily imagine the old sanctuary alive again. 
Thousands upon thousands of pilgrims were crowding the hill- 
sides. Sacred heralds had carried tidings of a time of universal 
peace. Along the bank of the Alpheos and over the plain we 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 65 

could see the tents of the multitude. Shopkeepers were selling 
bargains. Herds of sheep and oxen were standing ready for the 
great sacrifices. We look into the crowd and we see Lysias 
addressing a company from the opisthodomos of the Zeus Tem- 
ple. Plato and Pythagoras walk here. Pindar and Simonides 
are singing their sparkling odes. 

We picture the scene at midnight, when all had retired and 
the contestants were eagerly waiting for the morrow. In the 
clear oriental sky the stars seem very near. The moon is in 
full splendor and its light falls upon a glorious picture; the 
sleeping multitude, the silent temples, beautiful in their gran- 
deur, the crowd of statues which throng the sacred enclosure, 
the Alpheos flowing silently along the range of hills, the Mount 
of Kronos, the slope of which on the morrow will be crowded 
with spectators. 

Now we pass under the vaulted archway through which the 
contestants enter the stadium. We place our toe on the deep 
groove which extends the length of the marble slab and recall 
to our minds the Greek athlete as, full of vigor and with the 
promise of immortal glory before him, he waits breathless for 
the signal and then shoots down the course. Relatives and 
friends are sending forth cheer upon cheer of encouragement. 
We think of the apostle's words, "Seeing we are encompassed 
about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with patience 
the race set before us." We see the palm branch of victory 
presented to the victor on the spot. 

We wander again among the ruins. Now we see the solemn 
procession which escorts the victors to the Temple of Zeus, 
there to receive the priceless crown of olive. Music fills the 
holy place and before the matchless statue of the Phidian Zeus 
the victor kneels while it seems as if that calm and majestic 



66 CHRISTI IMAGO 

face returns the thanksgiving of his heart with the smile of 
Deity. 

Hard fought was the struggle of the ancient victor, but 
the apostle's words speak to us of a far greater and sterner 
contest. It may not be heralded and the world may not applaud. 
Our fight may be unnoticed and unseen, and none but God 
approve. 

The olive wreath faded away, but the apostle assures us of 
an incorruptible crown. The reward of Christian heroism is 
imperishable. Every noble deed, every self-denial, every gen- 
erous act, every loving service, is preparing us for the incor- 
ruptible crown. 

As the Greek victor received the olive wreath in the pres- 
ence of his God, so every victory over self brings to the human 
heart a vision of our God fuller, truer, and more abiding than 
statue carved by the hand of man. 

The incorruptible crown is the Christ halo on the soul, the 
very image of God in the heart of man. 



THE ENTRANCE INTO LIFE EVERLASTING 

THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EASTER 

CHEK.E is a mortal life and there is an immortal life. We 
live one or the other here on earth. The mortal life is made 
up of those elements which are transitory and perishable; the 
immortal life, of those which abide and are eternal. To make 
a sharp distinction between these qualities let us say that the 
mortal elements are those which perish by the using, while the 
immortal increase as we spend them. We know, of course, that 
riches and possessions diminish and are consumed. This is 
the stamp of mortality. A life wedded to these is mortal with 
them. "A man's life," says Christ, "does not consist in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth." 

In sharp antithesis to these are those elements which grow 
and increase in strict proportion to our expenditure of them. 
We know that love grows greater as we give it forth. The soul 
is filled with increased trust as we nurture faith. More beauti- 
ful becomes our life as it expresses beauty. 

We must not imagine that the great gulf between the 
mortal and the immortal is marked by the change which we 
call death. Immortality does not begin there. It begins here. 
The life given to the temporal is temporal. The life that lays 
hold on the eternal and abiding is eternal, and the ages of the 
ages are simply filling the soul with larger, richer, higher life. 

Christ saw the world a slave to power, greed, avarice, and 



68 CHRISTI IMAGO 

He came to break the chains. He came to point to the 
eternal beauty, the eternal love which cannot abide in selfish 
hearts. 

I wonder if amid the press of business, the rush of enter- 
prise, the rivalry of ambition, the intoxication of power, the 
world really considers what is that life which Jesus brought. 
I wonder if it sees its promise and its hope. I wonder if it is 
appropriating more and more its essential qualities which are 
immortal. 

There are other elements of life which we wish might perish 
as soon as they are born, but which, alas, may become truly im- 
mortal. They are hate, greed, suspicion, lust, pride, jealousy. 
The more the heart feeds on them the darker the life becomes, 
until they form a hell of which the eternal hell is the continua- 
tion and extension, shutting from the soul the vision of the 
God of glory. 

Homer, Virgil, and Dante have endeavored to portray hell 
with pictures of horror, but we can conceive no hell more dread- 
ful or gloomy than a human heart controlled by passion. The 
laws of God are natural, and it is not natural for peace, love, 
purity, beauty, to dwell in such abode. 

Our Lord says that one must be born again to enter the 
Kingdom of God. The new birth is the beginning of new life, 
the entrance upon immortal existence, the appreciation and lay- 
ing hold of those qualities which belong to the life which Jesus 
brought. To be a Christian is to have the mind of the Lord 
Jesus, and the new birth is the beginning of that mind in man. 

The mind of Jesus must grow in us gradually and progres- 
sively till Christ's thought is our thought, till Christ's life is 
our life. To have the mind of Christ is to look upon truth as 
Jesus did, honestly and bravely. To have the mind of Christ is 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 69 

to be as pure as Christ was pure, with our souls free from 
vulgar, mean and selfish thoughts. 

Is this but an ideal of life which man cannot attain? No. 
This is the test of our Christianity. "Know ye not," says the 
apostle, "that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit 
of God dwelleth in you?" 

This is the great achievement of the human soul, and it is 
nowhere more strongly or beautifully put than in the sublime 
utterance, "Till we all come . . . unto a perfect man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 

That is life, "the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
Christ." That is happiness. That is heaven. 



THE SOUL'S ACHIEVEMENT 

ASCENSION DAY 

CHE achievement of the soul is "the house not made with 
hands," which we are daily building in the heavens. 

We look at one of the city's sky-scrapers and we shudder 
to think how appalling the catastrophe if its walls should col- 
lapse. But we know that steel girders support them and that 
the steel has been tested in the furnace of fire. It seems some- 
times as if life would be crushed under the burden of sorrow, 
but how comforting is the assurance, "He knoweth our frame," 
and no burden will be too heavy to bear. 

Salvation is character, and that part of life endures which 
has been tested and tried. Our building in heaven will be what 
we put into it. God takes the material we give Him. This is 
a solemn thought, for it carries with it the responsibility to 
build properly. If we are selfish, our building must be selfish. 
If we are hateful, our building must be ugly. Every thought, 
word, aspiration, deed, is built therein everlastingly. Professor 
James goes so far as to declare that just as the stubs remain 
in the check book, to register the transaction when the check 
is removed, so every mental act which has become a part of the 
soul's life will endure forever. How unequivocally this scien- 
tific declaration points to future joy or remorse. 

The building of our mansion in heaven is a gradual 
process. We work for "a penny a day." We never receive a 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 71 

large sum all at once, but the little reward for daily duties. 
The scholar attains truth, not in a day, but little by little. The 
soul's character grows, little by little, day by day. It is the same 
old story, the mustard seed and then the great tree; the blade, 
then the ear, then the full corn. 

How beautiful we can make our building ! Love, the reful- 
gent light; faith and hope, the stately pillars; purity, the glis- 
tening gem; duty, the symmetry and proportion; sacrificial 
consecration, the imperishable and everlasting walls. 

How many frescoes are painted on the walls of our build- 
ing! These scenes are not forgotten by the recording angel. 
Christ has given a glimpse of some, "When I was hungry you 
fed Me" — that's one; "When I was sick you came unto Me" — 
that's another. These little acts of service, unnoticed and un- 
seen, we shall find in the light of heaven transformed and 
glorified into service for the King. 

How different will be our buildings! The humble laborer, 
the devoted mother, the patient sufferer on the bed of pain, 
are building faithfulness, consecration, patience therein. Re- 
cently I was sitting by the bedside of one who was dying of a 
painful and lingering disease. He turned to me and said, "Tell 
me why God allows me to still live in such suffering." I re- 
plied, "One reason is that you may show to me and to others 
how a Christian can bear suffering." All the patience of those 
weary days of agony was built into the heavenly mansion. The 
scholar builds truth, the artist beauty, the physician balm and 
comfort, the Sister of Charity builds a Christly dwelling, for 
her life is Christly sacrifice. 

God is all the time refining our building. That is the 
meaning of sorrow, pain, death. It is the rough stone calling 
for the sculptor's chisel. How hard the mallet strikes ! But the 



72 CHRISTI I^IAGO 

stone now becomes a stately column in a holy shrine. "Him 
that overcometh, I will make a pillar in the temple of My God." 
It is inspiring to see workmen building a foundation. You 
can almost imagine tlie heaven-pointing superstructure. There 
is nothing in this world so sad as to see a foundation on which 
no superstructure has been erected. It tells of failure. The 
plans of the architect have not been realized. The walls stand 
crumbling and decaying. But there is something infinitely 
sadder in God's sight. It is the foundation of life on which 
no superstructure has been built. God's plan for that life has 
not been carried out. Aspirations heavenward have never been 
realized. God speaks to us with His divine voice in the soul 
telling us to build, build into the "measure of the stature of 
the fulness of Christ." 



REVELATION 

SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION 

CHE highest knowledge is the knowledge of God, not know- 
ing about God but knowing God. There is a vast difference 
in knowing about a thing and knowing a thing. 

The science of botany was to my grandfather very different 
from what the science of botany is to me. The text books which 
he used have all been superseded to-day, and yet he may have 
known the flowers more intimately than I. He may have com- 
muned with them and taken into his life their purity and 
beauty. 

So too his intellectual knowledge about God was perhaps 
not what present theology would accept but he may have known 
God better than I, and have entered into closer fellowship 
with Him. 

A former pupil of mine, who now occupies a Professor's 
chair in a distinguished institution, came into my study one 
day, and asked me this question, "What is the aim of religion?" 
I replied that the aim of all religion was the communion of the 
personal soul with God. He asked, "How is this communion 
to be effected?" and I replied that such communion depends 
upon the degree of our removal of the veil that separates us 
from God, and then I added the words of a distinguished 
thinker: "The veil is always on the face of man, never on the 
face of God." 



74 CHRISTI IMAGO 

So it is that revelation comes to man. It is a gradual 
process. 

Take the student as he begins his high school or college 
course. He knows nothing of the great laws of astronomy, 
mathematics, chemistry, and physics, but as he goes on the veil 
is taken away, not from knowledge but from himself, and step 
by step he learns more of God's thoughts. The discovery of 
scientific truth shows the world not a new truth but it removes 
the veil from human eyes. 

Take the artist. Did you ever stand with him before a 
beautiful landscape, and have him point out to you glories and 
delicacies you had not seen? What is he doing? Not making 
new beauties but taking the veil from your eyes. 

So we grow in the knowledge of God not suddenly, but we 
see the God of Love more and more revealed as the veil of pride, 
suspicion, jealousy, and hate is taken from our soul. We see 
the God of Truth as the veil of ignorance and prejudice is 
removed. 

Heaven is communion with God and communion with God 
depends upon our knowledge of Him. 

As we can remove this veil, so we can thicken it in the same 
degree. The veil can become denser, the glass more darkened 
by removal from Him. We may mistake the glitter and tinsel 
of religion for the face of God. If we are living mortal, selfish 
lives, we see and love only those elements of life which are 
destructible. The soul becomes lost in what is perishable. It 
does not cleave to the essential and permanent. All this comes 
under the operation of a law as natural as the progress of 
human life. 

Let us take pride as an example. Pride comes in between 
self and God. Pride is a veil and before God can be revealed 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 75 

to that human heart this veil must be removed, and the removal 
of this veil is revelation. 

Again, take prejudice. A man with prejudice in his soul 
cannot see the truth wholly and sanely. There come between 
him and truth his own preconceived ideas. A veil shuts him 
from the God of Truth. 

Finally, take hatred. The human heart filled with anger, 
the lips which speak the unkind word, put between the soul 
and God a veil that is very black. How can the God of Love 
reveal Himself to such a soul? Every unkind thought, every 
mean act, removes us from the vision of love and consequently 
shuts us from the divine presence. 

The heart must be pure, that is, cleansed from these pas- 
sions which darken vision. Then we shall realize from our 
own experience what Christ meant when He said, "Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 



THE HALO OF DIVINE INTENSITY 

WHITSUNDAY 

TT I E might wonder why God's Holy Spirit did not descend 
^)^P upon the apostles amid the ceremonial grandeur of the 
Temple. But it came not there. It was in an insignificant 
room in an insignificant street of Jerusalem that the Holy 
Ghost appeared in tongues of flame symbolizing divine intensity 
and zeal. 

To-day God's spirit comes to us if we are ready to receive 
it. Our responsibility concerns itself with the degree of our 
receptivity. Think what it means to have the Holy Spirit 
enter the human soul. 

It means the driving out of ignorance, prejudice, selfish- 
ness, impurity, and pride. 

Have I been envious of another? Envy will have no place 
in my heart, for the Spirit of Christly Service dwells in me. 

Have I been unforgiving? I shall be more charitable, for 
the Spirit of Love dwells in me. 

Have I been little and narrow? I shall see with broad 
vision, for the Spirit of Truth dwells in me. 

Have I been selfish? I shall live for others, for the Spirit 
of Sacrifice dwells in me. 

The Divine Spirit brings transformation. 

We are metamorphosed into the likeness of the Divine, 
and this metamorphosis means that we reflect the life of God. 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 77 

If the world is to be saved it must be done through the 
revelation of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. 

The Eiffel Tower at Paris is now a great Marconi station. 
It receives the ether waves as they are transmitted from far 
beyond the sea. Originally it was erected for purposes of gain. 
The highest motive of its builders was a pecuniary one. For 
long years after the Paris Exposition it stood idle, a mere 
freak of man's invention. But to-day it has been touched with 
the finger of human progress, it catches the thousand messages 
from the skies, it has linked itself to the great immortal law 
of service. 

And so it is when our selfish and idle life has been touched 
with the finger of God's Holy Spirit. Like the Eiffel Tower 
we radiate messages of truth and courage, of healing and power. 
We become God's ministering spirits and we speak with new 
tongues. Our hearts glow with divine fire and we cast a bene- 
diction upon the world. 

St. Francis of Assisi once took a monk with him into the 
city telling him that they would preach that morning to the 
people. After passing through many of the city streets the 
monk said, "Francis, I thought we were going to preach. Is 
it not time that we began to preach our sermons ?" St. Franci? 
answered: "Why, we have been preaching all this morning! 
As we have touched our fellow-men on the crowded thorough- 
fares, the sorrowing, the despairing, the sick, the afflicted, the 
sinful, the ignorant, we have been preaching sermons more 
eloquent than spoken words." 

So it is as we pass in and out amid the rush of busy life. 
We are preaching our sermons. Our passing will make men 
stronger or weaker. We bring comfort to the sorrowing, help 
to the weak, balm to the suffering, truth to the benighted, in 



78 CHRISTI IMAGO 

such proportion as our own lives have been touched and kindled 
by the Holy Spirit. 

May the halo of our life ever cast a benediction upon the 
world ! 



THE ANCHOR OF THE SOUL 

TRINITY SUNDAY 

TTiHICH hope we have as an anchor of the soul sure and 
%f^ steadfast, which entereth into that within the veil." 

It recently was my privilege to stand beside an old Greek 
anchor which had lately been unearthed. We never look upon 
a relic of this kind which has been buried for twenty centuries 
or more without the feeling of reverence and awe. 

We think of the story that it might tell of that far away 
age. We think of the hands that once grasped it, now long 
mouldered into dust. We think of names long since forgotten. 
We look back through the vista of the centuries which have 
intervened, during which men have lived lives just like ours with 
the same sorrows, the same disappointments, the same joys. 

We wonder what story this relic has to tell. And it does 
have its story, for in spite of rust and corrosion I saw in large 
Greek uncials the words Zeus hypsistos, which we may trans- 
late, "God in the highest." 

These words speak volumes. Think you not that the Greek 
sailor in his little craft, rude, primitive, a plaything of the 
waves, felt more secure because he knew that down there in 
the slime and ooze and mud of the ocean's bottom his anchor 
bore the name of God supreme? Perhaps the apostle had seen 
such an anchor, and this had led him to the beautiful figure of 
faith as an anchor of the soul. 

What is faith? It is not sometliing that can be analyzed 



80 CHRISTI IMAGO 

in the crucible of scientific investigation. It is intuitive knowl- 
edge. I watch a vine as it reaches out its tendrils and mounts 
higher upon the trellis. I see a fledgeling as it tests its wings 
and soars into the sky. I see a man bowed down with sorrow 
raise his head above the clouds. The vine might have argued; 
"I have not hands to feel, I have not eyes to see," but it turns 
toward the sunlight and it is not deceived. The little bird 
might say : "My wings are so tiny and the ether is so vast," but 
something told it to spread its pinions and to fly far above our 
earth, and it was not deceived. So man when he looks upward 
to the stars will never, never be deceived. That is faith. 

Faith is not synonymous with dogmatic opinion. We some- 
times speak of it as such when we say: "A man has not the 
right faith." When a word with such purity of meaning has 
been incrusted with other significations it is well for us often 
to substitute another term for the Greek pistis, and such a term 
might be "trust." There have been heresy trials about a man's 
"faith," but there has never been a heresy trial concerning one's 
trust in God. 

In the British Museum I saw the Prayer Book which Lady 
Jane Grey carried with her to the scaffold, and she had under- 
lined these words on which her eyes last rested; "In Thee, O 
Lord, have I trusted; let me never be confounded." That is 
faith. 

Faith is optimism, the highest form of optimism, which 
is confidence in the ultimate triumph of truth and right- 
eousness. 

Pessimism is atheism and it is the worst form of atheism. 
A man said to me the other day, "I am growing old and I feat 
that life is losing its charm." What a sad commentary on his 
life! I thought of what was almost the last utterance of Sen- 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 81 

ator Hoar: "Gentlemen, yesterday was better than the day be- 
fore; to-day is better than yesterday; and to-morrow will be 
better than to-day." That is faith ! 

Near my old home in Massachusetts is a Faith Monument 
to the fathers who landed on that forbidding shore. It stands 
with face serenely tranquil pointing to the skies. I have seen 
it when the accumulated snows of winter have rested heavy on 
its head; I have seen it when the burning heat of summer beat 
down upon that barren hill. But in storm and sunshine, in 
winter's cold and summer's heat, it has stood as it stands at this 
hour, with its finger pointing toward the stars. 

Faith points us toward the stars, but more than this. It 
points us to some poor soul who does not see as plainly as we 
that the stars are shining — perhaps he does not know there are 
any stars above him — and it demands that we take him by the 
hand and point him to the stars. 

This is Christ's faith. This is the faith that saves. 



SPIRITUAL DISSIPATION 

FIRST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

TJiHAT is that waste of life? 

^)^P I do not refer to physical dissipation, the reckless 

squandering of bodily power which brings the outworn frame 
to the grave. 

I refer here to tliose thoughts and words and acts of little- 
ness, meanness, narrowness, greed, pride, envy, selfishness, that 
are constantly destroying the soul's life until we sometimes won- 
der what there is in that soul which can really commune with 
God. 

These take away the power of enjoyment, sympathy, and 
love, and shut out from the soul the vision of the divine. 

The light is gone or fast going out. 

It is a law of physics that what a body receives while cold 
it radiates when hot. 

Green glass absorbs the red; red glass absorbs the green. 
Put them in a furnace at white heat and the red shows green 
and the green red. 

The life must give out what it has absorbed. 

If we are taking into our souls impuritj^ untruth, jealousy, 
we must sooner or later show them forth. 

A man said he could break that law, sow his wild oats, and 
afterwards settle down. 

Years passed by. He sits by the fireside of his home and 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 83 

hears the consumptive cough of his little babe. He exclaims 
in agony, "What have I done that this innocent child must 
suffer?" 

He looks into the dying embers and to his soul comes the 
truth of the eternal law, what I absorbed that have I given forth. 

Yes, it is true. Any other modus operandi would make us 
less than man. 

We take into our souls truth, love, beauty, and what do we 
reflect ? 

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, 
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." 

The spiritual and the selfish cannot dwell together. 

As selfishness increases, the spiritual dies. 

We look at our little selves and magnify our own import- 
ance. 

It is the world vision we need. 

Selfishness is death, manifested in ten thousand ways. 

The man lost in self acts for self, thinks for self, lives 
for self. 

Take the daily thoughts of the selfish man. He thinks, 
"What will the day bring me?" As he thinks of self, he be- 
comes miserable, for he thinks of the world in relation to him, 
not of himself in relation to the world. 

Selfishness is the source of jealousy; he thinks, "Someone is 
getting more than I." 

Selfishness is the source of hatred; he thinks, "Someone 
has done me an injustice." 

Selfishness is tlie source of worry; he thinks, "What will 
become of me?" 

Selfishness is the source of meanness, for his thoughts are 
on a very mean and insignificant thing, self. 



84 CHRISTI IMAGO 

To free the mind of worry is to work for others and to 
enter the larger life of service. 

The life immortal is the life which links itself with the 
universe of God. 

In one of the galleries of Europe a party of travelers was 
standing before a matchless painting by one of the old masters, 
a painting which had inspired the art and song of centuries. 

Amid the hush that always falls in the hour of deep spirit- 
ual communion a rude voice was heard, "I have enough of 
this ! Let's go and see the royal stables !" 

So it is that the spiritual is dissipated by the sensuous, and 
men so often harken to the voice which calls them from tlie 
noble and the divine and the immortal to the sordid and tlie 
earthly and the perishable. 

The great life is the life that conserves the spiritual forces. 

The conservation of the spiritual is communion with God. 

Communion with God is Christianity. 



LIFE MEASURED BY UTILITY 

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE true power of life is its capacity for service. 
When Christ said, "I came that ye might have life, 
and might have it more abundantly," it was the life of service 
that He brought. 

In the physical world the same law prevails. Utility is the 
standard of value. 

We see a lump of iron on the mountain side and we ask 
an expert its value. He tells us that as an inert mass it is 
worth five dollars. 

Another comes and says that by making the lump into 
horseshoes he can make it worth fifty dollars. 

Another sees that out of the mass he can make needles to 
the value of five hundred dollars. 

A fourth declares that he can take that same lump of iron 
and make it into watch springs that will be worth five thousand 
dollars. 

It is the same bar of iron. Yet one man increases its 
value ten fold, another a hundred fold, another a thousand fold. 

So life has witliin itself the great possibilities of divine 
service. 

It is ours to determine what value we shall put upon it. 

Shall we gain ten talents, or shall we hide our one talent 
in the earth? 



86 CHRISTI IMAGO 

A great artist stood before a rude piece of stone and ex- 
claimed, "What divine beauty thou concealest." An unshapely 
block had been rejected by a great Italian sculptor. Years 
after, Michael Angelo saw it and out of this same stone which 
before had seemed so useless he carved his matchless Moses. 

So life sometime and somewhere under the hand of the 
Great Master will become moulded after the divine pattern and 
will show forth its full capacity of service. 

We associate the term infidel with one who is faithless in 
matters essential to our Christian belief. 

But there is another infidelity which brings our Lord's re- 
iterated denunciation. It is the infidelity in service, faithless- 
ness in divine ideals and aspirations, in loving ministrations, in 
altruistic consecration. 

There is no condemnation so expressive of the wasted or 
selfish life as the t^vo words "unfaithful servant." 

How concisely and yet how truly the simple phrase sums 
up the history of the unprofitable years. 

We do well to ask ourselves. Are we living the life of true 
value ? 

God Himself is asking, and He too will answer the ques- 
tion in accordance with the divine standard of service. 

I remember a recent summer when I had charge of a large 
city parish. I daily came face to face with pathetic cases of 
destitution, ignorance, crime, and sorrow. 

The deaconess and all the assist-ant clergy were on tlieir 
vacation, and so it happened that all these cases came under my 
personal direction. 

I never knew before how much suffering and sin there were 
in the world, or how human hearts were crj-ing out to us for 
help, guidance, and comfort. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 87 

I doubt if the average Christian knows a millionth part of 
the world's hunger. 

But ignorance of human needs can never serve as our 
excuse. 

Long ago the question was asked, "When saw we The© sick 
or in prison?" and our Lord answered, "Inasmuch as ye have 
not done it unto one of the least of these, ye have not done it 
unto Me." 

The faithless did not know that in the face of the poor 
and the suffering they beheld the face of Christ. 

It is upon our little acts of loving service which make up 
the great sum of life that Chrisfs benediction, "Faithful ser- 
vant," rests. 

These make life divine and a part of the great plan of God. 

I was worshipping in a chapel of one of the old world's 
cathedrals. It seemed at the evening hour as if our little shrine 
were isolated from the world, but in the light of day we realized 
how it was but a part of a far grander temple which raised its 
mighty dome high above our heads into the very heavens. 

The consecrated service of our daily lives will be seen at 
the last to be a part of the divine temple we are building for 
eternity. 



PERSONALITY 

THIRD SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

PERSONALITY is the greatest force in the world. 
What is it that gives persuasiveness to the orator's 
words? Not merely the purity of his style or the elegance of 
his diction. They do have force, it is true, but above all is the 
impress of his own personality. It is the man behind tlie 
words, for we seem to know him and to enter into the secrets 
of his heart. 

That is why words spoken with seriousness of conviction 
carry such weight. They come from the speaker's inmost soul 
and are a part of his deepest life. 

What constitutes the real and permanent success of the 
true teacher? Not the mechanical assigning of lessons and the 
grading of examination papers. 

It is the inspiration, the nobleness of purpose, the interest 
in and the devotion to the pupil which make the teacher's in- 
fluence abiding. 

As one looks over his student days he remembers not so 
much the mathematics or the psychology which he learned, but 
the teacher's personality as a real transforming power in his life 
which cannot be estimated. 

A king once decreed that he would declare by royal procla- 
mation that subject who had done the greatest service to the 
state. On the appointed day there assembled the wise and the 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 89 

great of tlie realm. Councillors of state were there and war- 
scarred heroes who had brought luster to the crown by blood 
and carnage. 

But it was on none of these the monarch looked. Hidden 
in the embrasure of the window he spied one unnoticed and for- 
gotten in that brilliant and crowded hall. It was the bent form 
of his old tutor whom the king now raised by the hand, and 
whose faltering steps he led to the royal throne. As a hush fell 
on all the people the monarch's voice was heard, ''Behold him 
who has done the greatest service to the state, for he has made 
your king." 

Again, let us take the influence of a mother's love. 

Is it her precepts, however noble, that remain in manhood's 
years ? 

It is rather her life, her devotion, her sacrifice, her 
love. 

Her zeal may be misdirected, her opinions may be erron- 
eous, her precepts may be unwise. 

Yet the man remembers one thing, his mother. 

In hours of weakness she is present as an inspiration, in 
moments of temptation he sees her beside him, and, as in child- 
hood days, he pictures the grief that would overshadow her face 
should he yield to impurity or dishonor. 

A mother's love is the greatest human influence in life. 

So it is we come to Christ. 

Christ did not emphasize His precepts however divine they 
were, but He pointed to His own personality as the guarantee 
of salvation. 

"Believe on Me." "I am the Light of the world." "I am 
the Way, the Truth, and the Life." To know Jesus Christ is 
everlasting life. 



90 CHRISTI I^L\GO 

Our religion is infinitely more than a set of rules and pre- 
cepts. Religion is life. Religion is the Christ personality. 

How Christ prepared Himself for the exercise of this divine 
personality ! In this we get a lesson on the importance of prep- 
aration. He did not come forth into the world to reveal God 
incarnate in Him till He was fully ready. 

In those long years of waiting there were the sin, the evil, 
the inequalities, the injustices of life which He must have felt 
so strongly with His clear moral vision. There were the rotten- 
ness of society, the glare of hypocrisy, tlie presumption of aris- 
tocracy, the falsehood, the oppression, and the distress which He 
had come from Heaven to alleviate. 

Yet He waited silently year after year till the proper hour 
when His divine influence should begin to work its mighty 
transformation. 

A weak man or an impetuous man might have plunged in 
and failed in his great purpose. 

The wise man, the strong man, is he who realizes his powers, 
conserves them, and bides the time of exercising the fulness of 
his personality. 

The life of Jesus in the human soul is revealed by him who 
has prepared himself by long communion with Him to show it 
foi-th to the world. 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHRIST'S Sonship with the Father was revealed to Peter 
when he uttered the memorable words, "Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the living God." Our Lord signifies to him 
that with such a revelation of the divine his life will become 
fixed, immovable, stable; "Thou art Peter (Rock) and on this 
rock I will build My Church," to be the repository of the powers 
of the spiritual life, the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

We all know the dogmatic controversies waged over these 
words of Christ. The recognition of Peter as princeps apos- 
tolorum, the foundation of the Church, met the demand of the 
age. When Rome lost her political authority, she transferred it 
to ecclesiastical domination. The Bishop of Rome took the 
power and prestige of the imperial Caesar and in accordance 
with this change these words of Christ became the foundation of 
ecclesiastical monarchy, words which in this interpretation at 
best were a vaticinium post eventum. 

It was doubtless the Providence of God that this should be- 
come the dominant idea of those centuries, for nothing but im- 
plicit obedience to an unquestioned and infallible authority 
could have perpetuated the life of the Church through the years 
of confusion, discord, and political strife. However much we 
reject such interpretation yet we should thank God that this 
thought was crystallized in the early life of the Christian 



92 CHRISTI IMAGO 

Church and thus prevented her being swept away by the waves 
of vacillating thought and opinion, by the vicissitudes of na- 
tions, and changes in civilization. Even to-day the Roman 
Church remains the most perfect organization the world has 
ever seen. The visitor cannot but feel awed as he stands beneath 
the huge dome of St. Peter's in Rome, and reads in the light of 
centuries the great letters in blue upon the gilt mosaic frieze: 
Tu es Peh'us et super hanc pefram aedificaho ecclesiam meam 
et tihi ddbo claves regni caelorum. 

The keys are given by the oriental landowner to the steward 
of his farm as the sign of his stewardship. Christ, we remember, 
draws His figures from familiar life, the sower of the field, 
the grain ripe for harvest, the vine by the wayside. It is not 
likely that we have a strange or unnatural meaning in the words 
which it took four centuries to fathom. The keys were to Peter 
the pledge of his stewardship. Stewardship over what? Over 
the Kingdom of Heaven, but as far as personal responsibility 
is concerned the Kingdom of Heaven is the divine life in the 
soul. The keys are not the pass keys to a literal or theologic 
Heaven. It is likely that our Lord spoke Aramaic, and in that 
language the phrase here translated into Greek means not so 
much tlie realm where God's laws are operative as the "rule of 
God," Whether we take the social or the personal view of the 
Kingdom, the sense is the same, the divine sovereignty in 
society, the divine sovereignty in the heart of man. 

Christ means that by vision of His divine Sonship Peter 
finds the door of the spiritual world open before him. This he 
can open to others by his example, or close by faithlessness to 
this ideal. 

What Christ gave to Peter He gives to us. We like Peter 
must have the vision; away from the low, the base, the selfish. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 93 

to the transcendence of love, purity and service. To us the 
keys of Heaven are given. We enter with our Lord into His 
divine life. Ours is the awful responsibility of opening the 
higher life to others, or by our greed and sordidness of closing 
fast the door. 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 

FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

ONE dark night, as I was walking the street of a great city, 
a young man met me who, to judge from his dress and 
conversation, was poor and illiterate. He had recently heard 
some lecturer express his views about Adam, and on our walk 
the stranger conversed with me on the likelihood that Adam 
was the first man. His views were very crude. He had a vague 
and misty conception of early civilization, and had patched from 
his fragmentary and blind knowledge several ingenious theories 
respecting God's plan and mode in peopling the world. 

As he turned to leave me at the door of his humble home, 
he said : "I have been this evening to help some poor families 
in one of the forsaken streets of our city." Then he added, 
half apologetically, "You know we ain't the only people in the 
world." 

I thought to myself how little it mattered what the man's 
theories were about Adam and about the early history of the 
world. There was one thing he did know — the only really 
essential thing — and that was he knew Christ and the Christ 
love and service. 

I wondered, as I walked along and entered a fashionable 
street of the city and looked at the houses of the rich and cul- 
tured, if they knew the spirit that my humble friend had ex- 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 95 

pressed in a way so homely and yet so significant, "We ain't 
the only people in the world." 

No, we are not, and for the others God is holding us ac- 
countable. 

Yes, we are our brother's keeper. He will be made glad 
or sorrowful, strong or weak, uplifted or degraded, courageous 
or unmanly, inspired or discouraged, by every deed we do, every 
thought we think, every word we say. 

He will see or he will not see Christ revealed in our lives. 

The measure of our Christianity is the measure of our 
revelation of the Christ spirit. 

God gave us dominion over physical forces to subdue the 
earth and the air, to fight disease, to dispel ignorance, and 
every step of our dominion has been marked by a corresponding 
advance in civilization. 

But with man a new law was born. Not the law of domin- 
ion, for that means the oppression of the weak, but the law of 
service recognized in the great truth that we are our brother's 
keeper. 

The reversal of these two laws is disastrous. 

To minister to disease is to spread pestilence and death. 

To subdue man is the tyranny of power over weakness, the 
aggrandizement of the few at the expense of toiling millions. 

Yes, we are to subdue the physical, we are to fight our pas- 
sions, our pride, our greed, but we are to serve the spiritual, we 
are to minister in love and sacrifice. 

Then the world will know that we have been with Jesus. 

How careful we should be that every act of ours is worthy 
of messengers of Christ. 

Arnold of Kugby removed all the signs of prohibition which 
had been hanging on the wall. He said, "From this time I 



96 CHRISTI I:NL\G0 

shall treat you as gentlemen on your honor."' Then it was looked 
upon as a smart thing for students to deceive. But the boys 
said, "We can't lie to Arnold, for he trusts us." 

It happened that one of the boys was accused of drunken- 
ness. Arnold called him and said, 'If this is repeated you must 
leave the school, for you are unworthy the spirit of Rugby." 
Some time after he asked the tutor about the young man, and 
the tutor replied, ''Have you not heard ? He is a changed boy." 
Arnold sent for him and asked the reason. The boy replied that 
it was a personal matter and that he would rather not tell. 
Arnold said, "I respect your feelings, but I want to know for 
my own satisfaction." The boy answered, "I kept saying 'I am 
unworthy of Rugby.' I took a bar of steel, heated it white hot, 
and branded an 'R' in the hollow of my right hand. I said, *I 
shall never stretch forth that hand to do anything unworthy of 
Rugby.' " 

Is the cross branded on our heart that no deed, or word, or 
thought of ours should ever be unworthy the Christ of service? 



THE POWER OF LOVE 

SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE Christianity of a man is measured by his love for others. 
We speak of service to God as being our highest aim, but 
service to God is love for man, "Inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me." 

The flowers glorify God because they give forth His beauty. 
As we pluck the rose and place it in the sick room, it breathes 
the sweetness of God's handiwork to the invalid even while its 
life is withering. 

The Hindus have a proverb that the tree protects with its 
shade him who is cutting at its roots. 

Life is self-revelation through love. 

God's law in the physical, mental, and spiritual world is 
growth through expenditure. 

Let the arm rest and it becomes weak and flabby. It is the 
expenditure of energy which increases power. 

In the mental sphere the expenditure of thought increases 
power of thought. 

Love is expended and therefore grows. Hope is replaced 
by new hopes. These things are the permanent part of life, 
and injury inflicted here is injury to the soul, eternal injury. 

It is low to steal or to swear, but how ruinous it is to be 
false in love or by suspicion to cast aside the affection of a 
friend, for this is losing a part of life. 



98 CHRISTI IMAGO 

Sophocles says, "To cast away a friend is the same as cast- 
ing away one's own life which he loves dearest of all." The 
saddest thing in life is broken friendship, friendship which 
has grown throughout the years severed for some trivial cause. 
Alas ! that misunderstanding, that imagined injury, which sepa- 
rates friends! 

Friends are a part of ourselves. We may lose money but 
that is an external loss. When we lose a friend it is losing a 
portion of our own existence. We cannot be the same after- 
ward, for nothing can make restitution. The life becomes 
smaller, weaker, sadder. Some of its greatness and joy is gone. 
A new friendship can never take the place of the old, for love 
is knowing a friend and knowing a friend is the work of years. 

The immortal part of ourselves is never increased without 
sacrifice. It costs something to be sympathetic and loving. 
There is many a heartache, but there comes the beauty of the 
transforming power of love. 

Horace says, "Happy the man who can say at the close of 
a day, I have lived," lived in the fullest sense of making that 
day a part of life. How precious is every day if our living is 
commuted by love into service. Then our daily duties can 
never be monotonous, for each day brings the greater revelation 
of God. 

We do not have to do great things. David Livingston, 
who died in Africa praying on his knees for that dark continent, 
was a poor factory boy, but his life given in love for humanity 
was more permanent in its power than the lives of the learned 
and the mighty. 

Sir James Simpson was once asked, near the close of his 
life, what was his greatest discovery. Everyone supposed that 
the famous Edinburgh professor would say that it was the 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 99 

application of chloroform, which had made him world-renowned. 
He replied, "My greatest discovery was when I found that Jesus 
Christ was my personal friend." This knowledge comes only 
through the power of love. 

Refinement has been defined as the capacity to enjoy and 
to suffer. The keenest joy of a truly refined nature is joy in 
friendship, the deepest sorrow is sympathy with those we love. 
Life is of the heart and love abides while other things pass 
away. 

A friend of mine was once assistant to Phillips Brooks at 
Trinity Church. He narrates how, one Monday morning, the 
clergy were gathered in the study and Brooks was constantly 
called out of the room through repeated ringing of the bell 
by people who were urgent to see him. Finally one of the com- 
pany said, "Tell them you can't see them, Mr. Brooks." He 
turned, and with that pained expression so often seen on his 
face, answered, "How sorry I should feel if they did not want 
to see me." 

The greatest power on earth is love. It rules a kingdom 
more eternal than earthly empire. 

Does this power rule supreme in our souls, making them 
more divine that they may mount upward towards God? 



THE PURE IN HEART 

SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

BLESSED are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." 
This is one of the highest and grandest of the Beatitudes. 
In practical language, it means: Blessed is the man who sees 
clearly and cleanly, who thinks soundly and sanely and wisely, 
who beholds life not piecemeal, but as one grand whole, who 
takes within his vision always the true, the beautiful, and 
the good. 

Purity of heart like all our spiritual achievements is a 
gradual process. Many don't see because they are not trained 
to see. Many don't see because they don't want to see. 

The Greek word for sin means literally "missing the mark." 
I may miss the mark on account of dim or defective vision. 
I may not know where I am aiming, or I may miss the mark 
deliberately, and voluntarily, but the result is the same in either 
case, failure to reach the goal. 

The sinful life is like the missent arrow; it fails to reach 
the target. 

This thought suggested by the derivation of the Greek word 
reminds me of a definition recently given for sin as a mis- 
directed search for God. Consider this characterization for a 
moment and see its full significance. The summum honum of 
life is God. All men seek for highest happiness. One thinks 
he will find it in the rapid life of sensuous pleasure and excite- 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 101 

ment or even in licentiousness, drunl^enness, and sensuality, 
but in the end he finds his joy turned to ashes. Another is in 
great sorrow and he turns to the drug or strong drink, and it 
must be admitted that this dulls for a time the keenness of his 
feelings, the acuteness of his grief, but at the last are bitter- 
ness and tears. Another seeks wealth, but wealth brings no 
abiding joy, for, as Socrates says, the soul stripped of all adorn- 
ments must stand at the last naked before God. 

A multimillionaire was sitting in his private car which 
was conveying the remains of his sister to Woodlawn Cemetery, 
and under the stress of his great affliction, he made this remark- 
able statement: "I am what the world would call a successful 
man. I have amassed millions, but I have done nothing to help 
another soul, and I am afraid that my life has been a failure." 
Then, pointing to the casket which contained the body of his 
sister, he remarked, "There was a successful life, gentle, sweet, 
unselfish, consecrated." 

How this illustrates the misdirected search for God. I may 
worship God with my lips, but if my heart is given to pleasure, 
avarice, and greed, I am really worshipping the wrong thing. 
"Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." 

Even in some types of religion, a man can become so in- 
tolerant and bigoted as to stultify himself. He thinks he is 
reaching out to God along the line of religion, but he can have 
little communion with the loving heart of the Father of all men. 

There is a beautiful story that after a great auto da fe 
in one of the Spanish cities there was seen, passing among the 
ashes of the burned, the figure of Christ Himself. The poor and 
the sorrowing fell down and adored Him. The Chief Inquisitor 
with the robes of his holy office about him, and on his breast a 
golden image of the Cross which was raised on Calvary in love 



102 CHRISTI IMAGO 

for suffering humanity, approached and said, "Who art Thou 
whom the people worship ?" It is told that our Lord looked upon 
him neither rebukingly, nor reproachfully, but with a face of 
love, gentleness, and mercy, with the same sweet smile which 
brought comfort to the afflicted on earth, and that He kissed 
the hard, cruel, thin lips of the Inquisitor. The trembling 
priest exclaimed, "Thou art the Christ. Depart from me. Lord, 
for I did not know that Christ was such as Thou." 

I fear that when we see Christ in His beauty and His love 
we too shall say, "0 Christ, I did not know that Christ was 
such as Thou." 

"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." 
We need the clear moral vision of the Christ to see life as He 
saw it. Then we shall grow younger though the years increase, 
and old age will be opalescent with the sunlight reflected from 
the source of divine light and truth. And best of all, the light 
that shines on us will shine through us to bless the world. 



THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER 

EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE spirit of prayer is unselfishness, a humble yielding to 
God's will, a conformity to the divine purpose, an earnest 
desire for the realization of God's Kingdom on earth. 

How we see this illustrated in the life of our Lord! His 
great prayer in agony of anticipated suffering was for His 
disciples : "Glorify them with Thy own Glory." Never did Jesus 
pray for Himself except for strength to suffer and to bear, 
except for complete submission to the Father's will: "Let this 
cup pass from Me, yet not as I will but as Thou wilt." His 
last prayer on earth was not for Himself but for His taunting, 
mocking executioners : "Forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." 

How unselfish is the Lord's Prayer which He has taught 
us! "Our Father," "Thy name," then the petition for daily 
strength, for the spirit of forgiveness as the basis of accepted 
repentance, and for deliverance from evil. Whether we inter- 
pret this last word in the abstract sense, or as the personal 
active power, yet it is one and the same, the evil of the lower 
self, pride, deceit, indulgence. Deliverance from evil is tlie 
emancipation of the soul from selfishness. 

This is the first step toward the Christian life. This is 
the first prerequisite before the spirit of our Lord can dwell 



104 CHRISTI IMAGO 

in us. For God to glorify us with the glory which Christ had 
is for God to give us the Christ sacrifice and service. 

When once the soul enters into this spirit there comes a 
vision of glory more and more transcendently splendid as life 
moves on, a vision not revealed to seer or prophet, to the great 
or to the wise of earth, but to the humble heart which knows 
what it is to serve. 

There is a lesson which we can gather from the Sistine 
Madonna that the oversea visitor to the Dresden Gallery fails 
to observe. We must remember how the picture was painted 
by Raphael as an altar-piece for the Church of San Sisto at 
Piacenza. The art of illusion, though generally condemned by 
critics, is practised here with splendid effect. The figTires are 
life size. On one side of the Madonna and Child stands the 
martyr St. Sixtus II., on the other Santa Barbara, martyr and 
patron saint of the Church at Piacenza. They do more than 
serve as a balance of counterpoise to the central group of the 
blessed Christ Child and His Mother. It is true that some 
critics have remarked that they were out of place and that the 
Madonna with her babe would be more effective without them. 
This is not so, as J. C. Van Dyke recently pointed out. If we 
could have seen the picture, not in the cold unattractiveness and 
incongruity of the art gallery, but in the old church, above the 
sacred altar blazing with many lights, through the smoke of 
the incense, amid chanted prayers, it would seem that the 
painted curtains were withdrawn as the veil between earth and 
heaven, that each cherub rests on the altar itself while, sur- 
rounded by the heavenly host, Mary and the Christ step forth 
to listen unto the prayers of the faithful. And now the effect 
of the two side figures comes upon the beholder. Santa Barbara 
turns toward the kneeling people in the attitude of prayer. She 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 105 

is praying for them. The old St. Sixtus points his finger toward 
the congregation as he gazes into the face of the Mother of 
God. He is saying: ^'Not for- me, hut for them." 

Is this out of place? No. It glorifies and hallows the 
scene. The unselfish prayer of the holy man and of the beauti- 
ful martyred girl is the spirit which we all must have when we 
come, as they, into the presence of the Christ Child. 

This is Christ's spirit. This is Christ's prayer. This is 
true Christian supplication, the prayer of those whose lives have 
been beautified by His holy and unselfish presence. 



THE TRANSFIGURED CHRIST 

THE TRANSFIGURATION 

CHE lesson of the Mount of the Transfiguration is seeing the 
divine through the human. It is a hard process and we 
have to climb the mountain to do it. 

It is thought by some critics that Peter's confession and 
our Lord's Transfiguration formed one pericope. Peter, as a 
Jew, was w^ondering what relation Christ bore to his native 
religion. He climbs the mountain side, and on the summit 
beholds our Lord in a new light not possible in the valley below. 
With this beatific vision upon him, Christ now asks the ques- 
tion, "Who am I?" and Peter replies, "Thou art the Christ." 
Jesus then gives him the assurance that on this rock of truth 
He will build His Church, and the gates of ignorance, prejudice, 
and darkness shall not prevail against it. 

Was this vision vouchsafed to Peter and not to us? We 
need a vision just as much as Peter did. In the complexity of 
modern life we need it even more. But to receive that vision 
we must climb the mountain. Let us look at some of the 
mountains we have to climb. 

There is the mountain of doubt, of difficulty, of perplexity. 
The Hindus have an old proverb, "He who surmounts doubt has 
the vision." No scientific discovery was ever made without 
questionings. In the dark room we see no cobwebs. We let the 
light in and we sweep away the hanging webs. There is no 



I 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 107 

premium on ignorance in the Kingdom of God, "Thou shalt 
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 

There is the mountain of joy. In moments of exaltation 
and exhilaration we may come close to God. Jacob Riis tells 
of how a check of seventy dollars was mailed to him with these 
words, "A great joy has come; a baby is born and we want the 
world to rejoice." 

There is the mountain of sorrow. Jacob Riis received an- 
other check a few days later with these words, "A great sorrow 
has come to us ; our baby is dead, and we want to do something 
to cheer humanity." Do we realize how many of our Lord's 
comforting words were spoken on the mountain? There is the 
mount of the Beatitudes, "Blessed are they that mourn : for they 
shall be comforted." Not long ago I was sitting beside the 
bedside of one whom I loved far dearer than my own life, and 
as I saw that life slowly slipping away into the spirit world 
I used to go to a little church near by for the early Communion 
service. When the minister turned and said, "Come unto Me, 
all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you," 
the words brought a new meaning. It seemed that Christ was 
speaking to me and to thousands of sorrowing hearts more ten- 
derly than ever before. Why ? Because I was hearing the words 
on the mountain of sorrow. We look into the faces of some of 
God's saints, and they speak to us that they have climbed the 
mountain and have seen the vision, Christ transfigured as the 
Comforter. Life is never the same thereafter. It is so much 
broader and more sympathetic. It can now help, bless, and com- 
fort others. 

There is the mountain of Redemption. As we climb this 
rugged hill, we behold on its summit a cross, and on that cross 
the Son of God. He speaks to us and says, "My child, if you 



108 CHRISTI IMAGO 

would be My disciple, you must take up your cross and follow 
Me." On the mountain of Redemption we learn how to crucify 
ourselves and enter the immortal life of sacrifice. 

In St. Peter's Cathedral I saw what at first I supposed was 
a colossal painting of the Transfiguration, but on coming 
nearer I found that it was a mosaic. I thought how at one time 
the work lay in a mass of rubble-stones on the floor, and how 
the artist carefully fitted each tiny particle in its place. He 
did not place the stones together at random, but first of all he 
had the vision, and he worked according to the pattern shown 
him in the Mount. If we had looked upon his work some 
months or even years after he had begun, we should have found 
little to admire. He could afford to wait, for he was building 
slowly but surely for the ages. Now long after the hand which 
fashioned has moulded into dust, the worshipper sees, in what 
was once a mass of rude and shapeless stones, the adoring saint, 
the enraptured apostle, and even the face of Christ Himself. 

What is the consummation? Our answer comes in these 
sublime words, "We all, with open face (i. e. faces from which 
the veil of ignorance and sin has been removed) reflecting as 
in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transfigured (i.e. meta- 
morphosed, the same Greek word which is used in the trans- 
figuration narrative) into the same image from glory to glory." 

Christianity is nothing more than this, and one thing sure, 
it is nothing less. 



HE CAME DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN 

TENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE reason for Christ's retirement to Caesarea Philippi was 
in order to obtain some respite from the persecution of the 
Pharisees and Sadducees. 

So have suffered great men at all ages. God's heroes are 
those who are fearless in the face of criticism from false 
standards. It has been rightly said that the great truths for 
which men died we breathe to-day as free as air. But men must 
suffer and die for them. Of these is the Kingdom of God. 

It was a wondrously beautiful landscape which was spread 
out before the view of Christ. The land was verdant and fertile, 
in sharp contrast to the wild country about Jerusalem. The 
stately temples told of the faith of the great world power with 
the magnificent cult of Jupiter and Apollo celebrated with all 
the splendor of Roman imperialism. 

These called invitingly to Christ. How easily Jesus could 
have yielded to the tolerant spirit of the Roman religion. Rome 
was most friendly to new phases of religious thought, as was 
exemplified by the introduction and adoption of the Mithra 
worship from Persia. Christ's own people had turned deaf ears 
to His earnest appeal. His great mission had been misunder- 
stood. He knows that the future promises no better success, 
but only increased sorrow, toil, and disappointment. If He 
enters the Graeco-Roman world He will secure peace, tran- 



110 CHRISTI IMAGO 

quility, success. Christ would have been remembered as one 
of the great philosophers of Rome, but He never would have 
been our Redeemer. 

The same temptation comes to us. We wonder if we should 
not give up the fight. We say, "Let dull ears continue dull." 
We think we are not appreciated and our work has been in vain. 
Then comes the thought, "Wliy not break faith with our mission 
and win the applause of men ?" For all our self-denial, we meet 
human ingratitude. We ask, "Have we not made a mistake 
in failing to look after our own interests in spite of the call to 
higher altruism?" 

On the mountain summit Christ reflected the glory of 
heaven. He was transfigured and His face was as bright as the 
sun. I wish we with adoring disciples could have looked upon 
that face. God's spirit shone through Him. He had conquered 
self. He had conquered the world. He made the supreme choice 
to "go down." And now He hears clearly the divine approval. 
It is God's voice which speaks, "This is My beloved Son in 
whom I am well pleased." 

How often God speaks to the human soul ! I see a Hebrew 
woman about her daily task. She lifts her eyes and sees the 
angel, and he says, "Blessed art thou among women." I see 
toiling fishermen clad in homespun climbing up the mountain- 
side. They see a vision of the transfigured Christ. I see sor- 
rowing women at the grave, but before them stands the angel 
and he says, "He is risen." So every mother as she bends over 
her child wears the halo of the Madonna. Men struggling with 
perplexity, and doubt, and sorrow, can behold the transfigured 
Christ. Mourning friends beside the tomb can hear the angel 
whisper, "Resurrexit." 

Christ goes down from the mountain, down from the vision 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 111 

of worldly peace, power, and honor, down from the rich valleys 
to the hot Judean sand, down to Gethsemane, to betrayal, to 
ignominy, to Golgotha. 

The same divine call comes to ns if we are to follow the 
footsteps of our Lord. It bids ns to go down from the allure- 
ments of sensuous pleasure, down from our ease, our comfort, 
our luxury, down from our selfish gains and ambitions, down 
to poor and suffering humanity, down to share their woes, down 
close to the broken heart, down to the degraded and sinful, 
down to the renunciation of our will, down to Calvary to crucify 
ourselves. 

It is God's call. 

The victory is the divine life in the soul. 

The reward is the peace which the world cannot give. 

"With forbidden pleasures 

Would this vain world charm ; 
Or its sordid treasures 

Spread to work me harm ; 
Bring to my remembrance 

Sad Gethsemane, 
Or, in darker semblance, 

Cross-crowned Calvary." 



THINK ON THESE THINGS 

ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

TTIHATSOEVER things are true, whatsoever things are 
^\F honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
good report . . . think on these things." 

We become what we make ourselves, and this depends 

largely on what we assimilate. A sculptor in the study of his 

model becomes like the ideal which possesses his soul. The 

.painter of the landscape comes close to the soul of nature. The 

scholar approaches ever nearer to the heart of truth. 

Thoughts are to the mind what food is to the body. 

If we think mean thoughts, we shall become like our 
thoughts. 

Thoughts crystallize into acts and acts into character. 

Show me a man who thinks of self, and I show you a man 
who acts for self. 

There is much meanness in the world, and if we search for 
it and think upon it, it will ever haunt us. 

The low and the small will sneak out of their hiding place 
and tabernacle with us. 

But let a man go through the world with his eyes fixed on 
the stars and he will see a vision of God. 

Man so often makes God like himself. A narrow man has 
a narrow God. A stern man has a stern God. The Pharisees 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 113 

wiere stern when they brought to Christ a woman taken in great 
sin. "Moses commanded us that such should be stoned." That 
is the law. Vast the difference between our Lord's judgment 
and theirs, a difference as great as between sunlight and frost. 
This was the verdict of a God of Love. 

If we love darkness, our spiritual sight becomes darkened. 

The visitor to Mammoth Cave sees in the Echo River the 
eyeless and colorless fish. We are told that these sightless 
creatures once had eyes which saw the light, that coming from 
the bright outside world into the stillness and eternal darkness 
of that cavern which for them became a permanent home, their 
vision was gradually dimmed; it vanished utterly, till at length 
in successive generations nature herself ceased to supply the 
organs of sight. 

This is nature's law everywhere ; true not only of the physi- 
cal eye, but true of the mental and spiritual eye; true of life 
in all its phases ; true of the soul of man. 

Despise with all the intensity of your mind two things, 
what is low and what is false; but instead of despising learn 
to pity those who are low and false, for as Sophocles says, "Such 
natures are for themselves the hardest to bear." 

How can we rid the soul of the selfish, the mean, the im- 
pure? Not by driving them away, for they return. How do 
we make a dark room bright? Not by driving out the dark- 
ness, but by opening the shutters and letting God's sunlight 
stream in. 

So it is with the soul. The true, the beautiful, the lovely, 
the pure, the holy are emanations from God which enter the 
heart of man if the windows of the soul are open to receive 
them. When Hercules wrestled with the nine-headed Hydra, 
lolaus burned the wounds inflicted, for before this two new 



114 CHRISTI lAIAGO 

ones grew for every one which was struck off. Superficial treat- 
ment would not do. The place had to be burned with fire. 

So sinful thoughts must be burned by the sun of Right- 
eousness, yes, often by the fire of trial and affliction. 

The sea mirrors the sky above it. It may reflect the dismal 
thunder cloud, the lurid lightning, or it may reflect the azure 
blue of God's fair heaven. 

In the same way our lives reflect our thoughts, dismal, foul, 
envious, or radiant, loving, holy. 

I ask that you read again the words of the apostle : "What- 
soever things are true," etc., and that you ever "think on these 
things." 



THE CAPTAIN OF OUR SALVATION 

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE phrase clearly shows that our Christian life is a warfare, 
a struggle, a stern conflict. It is a fight which calls for the 
exercise of all our powers. Temptations assail the soul, but 
they make that soul strong and heroic. 

Innocence is not virtue. Innocence is the mark of an un- 
developed life, and this state may be protracted even into 
mature years. The soul may never have wrestled with evil in 
the world. It may have been guarded and shielded from con- 
tamination with its fellows. 

Such a man is like the soldier who has never entered a 
great battle, who has never heard the note of the bugle, who 
knows nothing of the whistle of the bullets, who has never 
faced a foe. 

Manhood is formed by daily conflict with great forces, and 
character is a mastery of these. 

Asceticism may preserve innocence, but no asceticism gave 
us a Savonarola, a Luther, or a Christ. 

Sorrow and affliction may tear the heart, but these are like 
the plowshare which opens the hard ground that it may bear 
fruit. These are like the chisel in the hands of the sculptor 
which moulds the rude block of marble into the symmetry and 
perfection of the Doric pillar. 

The military metaphor plainly tells us that Christ is our 



116 CHRISTI IMAGO 

leader, that He goes the way before us, but that we must 
follow. 

We must suffer as Christ suffered ; we must serve as Christ 
served; we must love as Christ loved. 

Salvation is not a passive thing. It is not something which 
is wrought out for us, but it is something wrought out in us. 
It is Christly character. When this is perfected, no thought 
can ever escape our life and heart unworthy of the Chris- 
tian love. 

Wliat does it mean to follow after Christ? It means to get 
the Christly vision of sacrifice, to follow His steps in ministra- 
tion over the hot sands of Judea, to rebuke sin, hypocrisy, 
meanness, sham, littleness. It means to go to Gethsemane to 
make God's will supreme in our life, to walk the Via Dolorosa 
bearing the cross of service, to ascend the hill of Calvary, to 
crucify our selfishness and to enter into the immortal life of 
love. 

The bugle call is the call to sacrifice. The victory is the 
victory over self. 

A man was recently criticising in my presence what he 
considered was the selfish element in Christianity. But he was 
criticising the wrong' thing. What he meant to criticise was 
man's selfish conception of Christianity. And alas, it is too 
true that we sometimes have this selfish conception. If I 
struggle hard to save my own soul because it is my little in- 
dividual soul which I am endeavoring to save, if I believe a 
creed simply because it brings to me peace and comfort, if I 
give my alms to feed the poor because I think I am thereby 
laying up treasures in heaven, if I imagine I have a kind of 
title deed in the Kingdom of God, then this is absolute selfish- 
ness, not Christianity. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 117 

If I toil hard to save my soul, it may be that I shall suc- 
ceed, but of one thing I am sure, that if I give my life to save 
the soul of another, there will never be a question about my own 
salvation. "He that loseth his life the same will save it." 

Let us not content ourselves with the thought that we are 
God's beneficiaries. No, we are His messengers, His servants, 
His ministering angels. 

God wants many saved, but He wants you and me to be 
saviours. 

Pious expressions which may readily flow from our lips 
can never be substituted in the warfare of life for sacrifice 
and service. 

We can never serve God without serving humanity. 

We can never sin against God without sinning against 
humanity. 

The test of our following our Captain is determined by the 
degree of our service to humanity. 

St. Francis of Assisi, we remember, after a life of self- 
renunciation and love which entered into the life of the world 
so fully that he even preached to the birds that they should be 
thankful, beheld a vision of Christ and His Cross, and so vital 
was that vision to his soul that he bore on his body the stigmata 
of our suffering Lord. 

So, as we follow the Captain of our Salvation, we must 
bear on our hands the print of the wounds which He suffered, 
that these hands may never be outstretched except in loving 
ministration and consecrated service. 



SONSHIP 

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

now are we the sons of God ; and it doth not yet appear what 
we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we 
shall be like unto Him; for we shall see him as He is." 

These strong and grand words express two very vital truths, 
our present divine sonship, and our future glorification; "Now 
are we the sons of God." "We shall be like unto Him." The 
term sonship is not used in a metaphorical or an abstract sense, 
but with all the fulness of its literal interpretation. 

Otherwise there could be no promise of future glorification. 

Neither is the sonship which Christ revealed like the son- 
ship expressed in the ancient conception of a patria potestas. 
It is infinitely more than that. It is that conformity which 
comes through affinity of nature. Christ's life was the Father's 
life, and the Father's life was Christ's life. 

That was the message of Christianity to the world, the 
divine sonship with God that carries with it unity of will and 
life. Rome gave to Christianity imperialism. An Emperor on 
the Palatine governed the world through an elaborate system 
of subalterns. It was inevitable that this system should be 
grafted upon Christianity. As the subject could not approach 
the imperial throne except through a regular series of sub- 
ordinate officials, so the Christian could not approach God 
except through intermediaries. The Blessed Virgin must in- 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 119 

tercede with Christ, the saints with the Virgin, till at last Chris- 
tianity touches God afar off. How the beautiful and simple 
message of our Divine Christ had been perverted. That is no 
Gospel. The Gospel is that the prodigal son far away in his sin 
and degradation and vileness realizes that he is the son of his 
father, and comes directly to his father's house where the 
father's love enfolds him. 

''Now are we the sons of God," here in this world, amid 
sin, temptation, trial, disappointment, failure. 

Does a man ever fall so low as to cease to be a son of God? 
Ask a mother if her love has forsaken her erring boy. 

Does God refuse worship because it is offered in blindness 
or superstition? Ask the mother if the caress of the tiny hand 
upon her cheek, though the baby lips cannot express in intelli- 
gent language loving devotion, is not dear to the maternal 
heart. 

I saw an Italian peasant kiss the feet of the hamhino at 
Home. What might have been on my part idolatry, had I imi- 
tated his example, was in him an act of worship, sincere and 
loyal, and I doubt not found its way to the heart of Infinite 
Love. Wherever the human heart beats, we see a child of God. 

Sonship is the inheritance of God's nature just as truly 
and just as vitally as the son inherits his earthly father's nature. 

Is God divine? Then we are divine. Is God holy? Then 
we can become holy. Is God eternal? Then we are immortal. 

The great question is one of degree. How holy are we? 
How loving are we? How much of divine sacrifice, purity, 
truth, are we taking day by day into ourselves? 

This brings us to the vast responsibility of sonship, the 
perfecting of that inheritance into the likeness of the Father's 
character. The future of the Gospel is the future where the 



120 CHRISTI IMAGO 

divine sonship shall increase in us by our making the Father*s 
life our life and by our making the Father's will our will. 

The transforming and mysterious power which brings the 
consummation is love. Through it our hearts are made sensi- 
tive and tender to receive the impression of the holy Christ. 
Christ enters there more to-day than He did on yesterday, and 
He will enter more to-morrow than to-day. 

"Now are w^e the sons of God . . . When He shall appear" 
{i. e. shall be manifested unto us) "we shall he like unto Him." 



RETALIATION 

FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHE precepts of Christ expressly forbid retaliation. How 
many say: "That is all right theoretically, but it is not 
practical." Christ was the most practical man that ever lived. 
He had no visionary scheme in His mind. Christ was no day 
dreamer. If His teachings are not practical, they are nothing. 
With no uncertain sound He utters His several judgments 
against retaliation: "H ye forgive not men their trespasses 
your Father will not forgive your trespasses." The prayer of 
our Saviour amid the insult and the pain of the cross was : 
"Father, forgive them." 

Do we really want to be forgiving? Don't we in our hearts 
admire the man who is quick to resent an insult? If we do, 
then it is true that in proportion to such a feeling we are 
removed from the Christ spirit. Injury is not righted by injury, 
nor wrong by wrong. 

There was a time when it was considered an honorable 
thing to avenge an insult by the endeavor on the part of two 
individuals to murder each other at the distance of one hundred 
paces. That was a code of "Christian" honor. But to-day 
should a man offer such redress for a wrong, civilization would 
regard him either as a lunatic or as a criminal. 

Yes, Christ's teachings have borne fruit as the centuries 
have come and gone. The field of honor is a relic of the past. 



122 CHRISTI IMAGO 

To-day men are beginning to realize that public wrongs, 
as well as private, are not to be avenged, that punishment should 
never be vindictive. Think of the pagan idea of punishment 
which was grafted upon Christian civilization, and you have 
the block, the gibbet, the wheel, the stake, tlie cord, as the 
penalty for even trivial offenses. The horrible spectacles were 
intended to be warnings to the multitude. Human life was a 
cheap sacrifice. But to-day in the fuller light of Christ's 
teachings we are beginning to interpret our own responsibility 
in that we owe a debt even to the criminal. Criminology is 
becoming revolutionized. Our prisons should be reformatories. 
That is Christ's spirit working in the hearts of men. The old 
conception expressed in the Latin idiom poenas dare, as if 
vengeance were something the injured party must exact, is 
passing away before the higher law of forgiveness. 

The Latin word impotens is significant, for it pictures a 
man who has lost control of self, a creature of emotions, a slave 
of impulse. Show me the man who is quick to retaliate, and 
I show you the weak man and the small man. The strong man 
is the man self-controlled in midst of provocation. 

Strength is restraint. It is far better to submit to wrong 
doing than to be in submission to the feelings of hate and 
resentment. 

The medals given by the Pope to the Knights of St. John 
were emblazoned on the one side with a sword and on the other 
with the cross. We fear that this is a type of many men's 
Christianity to-day as much as it was then. The sword sym- 
bolizes personal greed, selfishness, vindictiveness, revenge. The 
cross is the holy token of consecration, unselfishness, forgive- 
ness. We may think it is indeed incongruous for such anti- 
thetic devices to stand on one and the same medallion, but it 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 123 

is a thousand times more inconsistent for these antagonistic 
principles to abide in the soul of man. 

Either the soul is a servant of Christ, or it is a slave of 
self. It must be one. It cannot be both, 

Christ demands the whole life, our thoughts, emotions, im- 
pulses, desires, ambitions. 

Not the cross and the sword, but the cross or the sword. 
That is the choice we have to make. 



THE STILL SMALL VOICE 

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

TT| HEN God speaks to the heart of man it is always in that 
^1^ still small voice which may be so easily unheeded. Our 
ears may be too dull to receive the divine whisper. 

It is true that sometimes the storm and the tempest may be 
necessary to clear the atmosphere of the soul and to make it 
responsive. 

It may be the tempest of trial when our hearts are made 
strong and brave. 

It may be the storm of sorrow when the human heart is 
made tender and sympathetic. 

It may be at this hour that the soul hears the still small 
voice, and life becomes new and holy because it has heard the 
whisper of God. 

How responsive Christ was to the divine voice! 

At His baptism His ears heard the message from the sky, 
"Thou art My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 

As we go forth in life, do we hear God say, "Thou art My 
beloved child in whom My heart delighteth"? 

He does speak those words to us, and if we do not hear them 
it is because our hearts are too dull. 

What a difference between the life which hears God speak 
and the life which does not! 

In the dark hour of Gethsemane when our Lord utters the 




THE CHRISTED LIFE 125 

sublime prayer, "Thy will, not Mine, be done," He hears the 
angelic voice which brings comfort and ministration. 

So we too, when our will becomes God's will, hear voices 
from the skies whispering peace and calm. 

The great life is the life that hears; the little life is the 
life that catches not the voice divine. 

How strikingly is this illustrated in the perfect serenity 
of Jesus' thought. 

His peace was the consciousness of the divine voice within 
Him speaking approval and comfort. 

We cannot deny that perfect happiness is the highest 
object of life. 

But perfect happiness is perfect peace. 

We do well amid the pretentions of modern theories to ask 
who can give peace ? It is not won in the pursuit for it. Christ 
promises peace in divine consecration to service. He says, 
"My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth give I 
unto you." 

From worldly standards His life seems antithetic to the 
bestowment of such a boon. 

Poor and despised and regarded as a fanatic and a social 
disturber, one who had already proclaimed that He had not 
come to send peace but a sword, one whose sociological teach- 
ings, if unchecked, would cause disruption to the power of 
Rome, the Jewish hierarchy, and the social distinctions of the 
age, yet He promises to bring rest amid unrest, for He hears 
God's voice. 

Jesus Christ was more than a reformer. His weapons were 
aimed at the very heart of the then existing institutions. 

Yet what is His legacy to those who have been faithful 
to Him? Not wealth, not power, not prestige, not worldly 



126 CHRISTI IMAGO 

honors, but something infinitely greater, peace. He who had 
no place to lay His head promises the summum honum of life. 
His own peace. 

Then He adds these words interpreted only in the light of 
days to come, "Not as the world giveth give I unto you." 

He knows His faithful ones are to receive little of what 
the world calls peace. He knows they have not yet heard God 
speak in that still small voice. 

He knows their future persecutions, trials, and martyrdom, 
and, as if His words might find echo in their hearts amid trouble, 
and pain, and death. He anticipates their questionings with the 
comfort, "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
afraid." It is then they will hear God's whisper as their 
Master heard. 

The peace of Jesus is to be our peace. 

The peace which Jesus brings is His own voice speaking 
in the human heart. 

Whether the still small voice comes to us in the sunshine 
of prosperity, in the clouds of adversity, in the gloom of afflic- 
tion, in the storm of temptation and trial, in the hour of self- 
denial, may our ears be opened to hear it and may we obey its 
divine call. 

It will summon us to higher resolves, more noble purpose, 
more divine ideals, more perfect consecration, more unselfish 
service. 

But it is a blessed thought that obedience to this voice 
brings that peace of God which passeth understanding, our 
guide and solace, our inspiration and hope, through life and 
death. 



OUR BODY THE TEMPLE OF GOD 

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

GOD intended that the habitation of the soul should be as 
beautiful as possible. During its earthly life the inter- 
dependence of the soul and body is such that every psychical 
exhilaration or depression produces physical results and vice 
versa. Show me an impure mind, and I show you an impure 
body. Show me a body polluted by immorality or degraded 
by low practices and I show you a soul morally unclean. 

The Gospel of Christ did not give to men a set of rules. 
The legislation of Sinai was prohibitive. Christ's teachings 
were a principle which was to increase in its sway over human 
hearts in proportion as we grew large enough to receive and 
obey it. Christ does not say, "Thou shalt not drink ; thou shalt 
not degrade thyself," but a far higher law dictates that our 
bodies must be pure because they are the temple of the living 
God. The grandeur of this conception becomes higher as our 
knowledge of God grows. We must think of God and realize 
what it means for the Infinite to take our bodies as His divine 
habitation. God is a God of beauty. Is our body beautiful 
or defiled? God is a God of purity. Is our body a pure 
temple of His presence? God is a God of holiness. Is our 
body a sanctuary where a holy God can abide? 

In the old Greek temple the inner room or naos was a holy 
of holies. The word which some Greek writers use to describe 



128 CHRISTI IMAGO 

this apartment implies undoubtedly the presence chamber of 
the deity. The matchless chryselephantine statue that stood 
therein was not merely dedicated to divinity, but it symbolized 
the presence of God Himself. 

At the summit of the scala santa is the ancient chapel of 
the Lateran, the only part which remains of the old papal 
palace. So sacred is the enclosure that none but the Pope or 
one commissioned by him can enter the holy precinct. 

If wood and stone are holy because a part of God's earthly 
temple, how infinitely more sacred is the human body, the 
abiding place of His living presence ! Here should enter nothing 
profane, nothing unholy, nothing defiling. Anything injurious 
to our body is a sin because it mars the temple of God. 

So close is the relation of the soul to the body that a noble 
aspiration, a high impulse, a beautiful thought, stamp them- 
selves in physical image on the face. The body itself shares in 
the health and purity of the soul. 

In fact, so close is the union between soul and body that 
physiological psychology deals not with the mind as mind, but 
with its relation to the physical organism. Our laboratories 
go so far as to take up the mystery of the soul's existence, and 
to ask, "If consciousness be a function of the brain, how is it 
related to the brain?" Psycho-physiology declares, as we well 
know, that when the organism of the brain is gross, thought is 
dull; when it is fine and delicate, thought becomes keen and 
active. All this means bodily influence on the mind and soul. 
It means that as we care for our bodies we care for our 
souls. 

In the physical world growth is synonymous with life. A 
blasting frost or a withering drought arrests plant growth. 
So anything which hinders the fullest bodily development re- 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 129 

tards growth and stunts the stature, and a deliberate act that 
causes physical injury is a deliberate sin. 

Christianity demands that we keep our bodies as pure, as 
beautiful, as vigorous as the physical laws of God allow. It 
was no misconception, no misapplication of language, for the 
Greek to identify beauty and goodness. The full powers of the 
soul can find expansion only in a healthy body. The more 
healthy the body, the stronger and the more vigorous can be 
the exhibition of Christian character. 



HUMAN JUDGMENT 

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

J'^UDGMENT is an analytical process. The Greek word hrino 
signifies discrimination, separation, and to judge aright 
we must be in the position to separate the true from the false, 
the good from the bad, the pure from the impure, the just from 
the unjust, the loving from the unloving. 

We must estimate things not at the seeming but at the 
real value. Human eyes and ears cannot always do it. Some 
eyes love to see the bad. Some ears love to hear slander. Some 
souls love to absorb unpleasant exhalations that arise from 
earth. Some hearts rejoice in the weakness of others. Some 
do not dwell upon whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
things are of good report. 

Human judgment has vast limitations. Ignorance blinds 
it. Prejudice perverts it. We cannot know another's motives. 
How many a slight, not intended as a slight, disrupts friend- 
ship. We judge the drunkard in the gutter, but know nothing 
of the temptations that assail him or the degrading effects of 
his environment. Prejudice is prejudging things out of propor- 
tion to their value. Human life is too great to be measured 
in human scales. 

One thing is sure; every unkind thought toward another 
removes the soul farther from God. Great personalities, we 
find, pity the frailties of human life and make their estimate 
with greater and greater sympathy. How beautiful this is. 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 131 

and the reason is because as they go onward they are getting 
nearer to God. 

One prohibition our Lord utters most sternly and attaches 
to it the penalty of its violation: "Judge not that ye be not 
judged, for with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged." 
Are we willing that at the last the same judgment be pro- 
nounced upon our lives that we indiscriminately make day 
by day? 

Our judgments go out into the world. We cannot take 
them back. They go as a curse or as a blessing, and they will 
meet us when life is over. 

The assassin bred in an environment of crime waits in 
the dark alley and plunges his dagger into his victim's heart. 
He pays the debt of his crime to society. But what judgment 
will be pronounced on men and w^omen of culture and refine- 
ment who, with hate in their hearts, injure the character of 
another by slanderous report, or, what is even worse, by base 
insinuation ? 

Thank God that human souls, when life is over, are judged 
by One who knows and who never makes mistakes. 

It is said that the bells of St. Michael's, at Charleston, 
S. C., have three times crossed the sea. They were broken in 
the Revolution, but each piece was carefully gathered and sent 
to England, where all were melted and recast in the foundry 
in which they were originally made. Again they crossed the 
ocean, perfect once more, and were put in place in the heaven- 
pointing spire where they ring out, without the loss of a single 
note, without the marring of a single tone, the grand symphony 
of their celestial music. 

Will not God do thus with the broken fragments of human 
life? Will He not recast them in the glow of His infinite love 
that they may join in the eternal melody? 



THE ANIMAL AND THE DIVINE 

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

TN every human life there is a ceaseless struggle between two 
opposing forces. In familiar theologic phraseology we may 
speak of original sin, total depravity, the fall of man, the old 
Adam, or in scientific terms we may speak of the animal, the 
bestial within ourselves. We may believe with one theological 
opinion that man fell from a higher state, that he was once in- 
nocent, but now impure, or we may believe with another view 
that man never was so morally advanced as to-day, that life 
has been a succession of changes from the lower to the higher, 
not from the higher to the lower, that each successive change 
marks new life and that God throughout the ages has been 
leading man nearer to Himself. 

Our chief concern is not the past, but the future, not what 
we have been, but what we are to become. 

The battle of animalism and our higher humanity is a 
battle of the race and of the individual. The animal lives for 
self. It is virtue in the shark as he swims the ocean to destroy 
what comes in his way in the struggle for existence. But the 
divine in man is to protect the weak. The lion is true to his 
beasthood when he tears in pieces his antagonist. The divine 
is to forgive. The panther reaches his highest development in 
stealth and treachery. The divine calls to honor, truth, sin- 
cerity. The bee hoards her wealth in her own hive, and the 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 133 

vaster the acquisition the more faithfully she has obeyed her 
highest nature. The divine demands of man unselfishness, 
service, sacrifice, and love. The charm of the bird is its con- 
stant carols when it strains its tiny throat in pathless woods 
with liquid notes of joy. The divine calls man to activity and 
progress, and duty faithfully performed is our highest hymn 
of praise to our Creator. 

Christ, the fulness of the divine, defines the great purpose 
of His coming to earth to be the imparting to the human soul 
more abundant life. "I came that ye might have life and that 
ye might have it more abundantly." This life which our 
Saviour brought was the triumph of the divine over the animal. 

Does the progress of society show this? Is God leading 
men by gradual successive changes into a newer and higher 
humanity, a humanity which shall be divine, a humanity which 
shall become like that humanity which Christ exalted through 
His own Godhead? 

There is need of no great insight to see advance, and no 
excessive optimism to prophesy triumphant victory. From the 
savage to the philanthropist the triumph is that of the divine. 

What is countenanced to-day may be condemned to-morrow. 
Once polygamy was sanctioned by law, now law in civilized 
countries condemns it as a crime. Once piracy and rapine as 
the triumph of might over weakness were national pride. Now 
the law of nations will not tolerate plunder. Once personal 
wrong could be wiped out by bloodshed. Now the "affair of 
honor" is homicide. Once crime called for vengeance. To-day 
penology looks toward the reclaiming of the criminal. Once 
punishment was vindictive. Now it is fast becoming re- 
formatory. 

The divine life which the divine Christ promised is work- 



134 CHRISTI BIAGO 

ing more and more in our humanity, and the future far beyond 
the past will show vaster triumph. 

God's life in the soul must go out unto its own, until it 
reaches divine life. It is only a question of time and struggle 
when the divine shall triumph over the animal, when the love 
of Christ in the souls of men shall triumph over selfishness, 
greed, and pride. 



THE SHADOW OF LIFE 

NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHEHE is nothing more unchristian, not to say vulgar, than 
snobbishness. It is so antagonistic to the Christ spirit 
that it is impossible for a soul that despises or looks down upon 
a fellow-creature to enter into communion with God. 

The true man or the true woman is the one who is cour- 
teous to all, and courtesy is but another name for love. 

We do not find snobbishness in the truly great, but in the 
common. It is so easy for man to be common. The common 
man has to be snobbish, for his conunonness becomes in his 
own eyes a mark of prestige, and he fears that to be one with 
the poor and outcast is to degrade himself. 

Disdain and pride have shut many souls from God. Self- 
exaltation and contempt for others are such insidious evils that 
before we are aware of their presence we are estranged from 
the heart of humanity, from divine life, and do not realize that 
we are estranged. 

It is not learning or wealth which makes life, but character. 
True life sees as God sees, and is one with humanity. I don't 
care how rich one may be, or how learned one may be, if his 
heart does not go out in love to all, he has a narrow petty ex- 
istence which sooner or later is to be lost in its own selfishness. 

Christ did not rebuke the sinner. He had compassion for 
him. His heart went out yearningly toward vile, outcast, fallen 



136 CHRISTI IMAGO 

humanity, but against the proud and haughty His condemna- 
tion was stern and uncompromising. 

It is related that at an important function which occurred 
several years ago at the White House, a lady entered richly 
apparelled and with charming grace. As she approached the 
wives of the official corps, they gave her only a rigid nod and 
exchanged not a word of greeting, for they recognized her as 
a former milliner in !N'ew York City who did not belong to 
their "set." The wife of the President observed the embarrass- 
ment of her visitor and excusing herself went to the young 
woman and said, "I am especially glad to see you here." Then 
the first lady of the land took her guest by the hand and arm 
in arm they walked down the brilliantly lighted hall. This act 
was queenly. It was Christian. 

If position, learning, or wealth separates a soul from hu- 
manity, then it separates a soul from God, and we realize the 
truth of Christ's words that it is harder for a rich man to 
enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through 
the needle's eye. 

If I magnify my own little atom of self and imagine I 
have more, or I know more, or I am more, than another of 
God's children, if I refuse to love one lower or meaner than 
myself, then, unless I mistake the teachings of our Lord, I am 
no Christian, and I do not even know what the Kingdom of 
Heaven means. Yes, more tlian that, if I despise another be- 
cause of his station in life, a humble child of God whose soul 
may be fairer than mine, unless I am mistaken in what con- 
stitutes true manhood, I am no man in the sense of the dignity 
which that term should bear. I am but a petty and useless 
creature, an encumbrance, an inflated bubble upon the surface 
of God's world, and society will be better off when I am gone. 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 137 

That shrug of the shoulder, that air of proud superiority, 
that haughty word, go out into the world like deadly weapons. 
What bitterness and sorrow they carry to human hearts ! 

While we might bring blessing to the needy, balm to the 
suffering, comfort to the sorrowing, we choose to send the 
poisonous shafts. We make the weak more weak, the untrue 
more untrue, the uncourageous more uncourageous. 

There is a beautiful story that an old monk had lived such 
a saintly and Christly life that an angel came to him and 
promised him that any request which he might make should 
be granted. The monk did not ask for wealth and power, but 
with greatest humility he requested that as he passed through 
the world he might do all the good he could without knowing 
it. So it happened as he went through the streets, his shadow 
fell behind him and all who came within that shadow were 
healed and comforted and blessed. 

OVTay it be that the shadow of our life shall be the shadow 
of benediction ! 



PURITY OF HEART 

TWENTIETH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

PURITY is clearness and cleanness. Applied to life it means 
clear perspective and clean, sound, and sane thinking. Im- 
purity is sullied vision resulting in bigotry, ignorance, un- 
cleanness, selfishness, and hypocrisy. 

Hypocrisy is to live a lie, and to live a lie is worse than 
to tell a lie. This is the real lie which Socrates declares is 
infinitely more ruinous than the verbal lie, for it becomes a 
part of man's own life and sooner or later he actually believes 
it and such belief makes his whole existence untrue. 

Horace's integer vitae scelerisque purus not has but is a 
panoply invulnerable. The pure life is its own defence. 

Purity is strength. Tell me the strength of a chemical 
in the laboratory and I can judge of its purity. 

Purity is intensity. The purer the flame the more intense 
the heat. Moses saw God in the burning bush and the bush 
was not consumed because the fire which burned there was the 
fire of zeal. 

There are flames which do consume, the flames of passion, 
lust, anger, and they leave the soul blackened and scarred. 

In Aeschylean thought impurity becomes a parent of a 
progeny like itself which goes forth* to curse the world. 

The pure life is dominated by holy purpose, consecrated 
ambition, intensity of effort. 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 139 

The light of the body is the eye, but the eye must be single 
for the body to be full of light. The great world with the life 
of nature, the beauty of the flowers, the glory of the heavens, 
enters the mental understanding through the tiny physiological 
mechanism we call the eye. 

What is necessary to sight? 

First, radiant energy, the stimulus of light, the activity 
excited by the rays. The crystalline lens focuses on the retina 
the optical impression, which is conveyed by the optic nerve 
to the brain, where we receive a mental concept of the visual 
image. So the light of God is focused on the soul and clears 
it of selfishness and blindness. 

Second, the slow evolution of the sight organs. Pigment 
spots responsive to light exist in the lowest forms of life, as 
in infusorians. The structural character may be seen in the 
snails and worms, yet what real vision is there to a snail or a 
worm ? The physical power of sight is developed more and more 
until we have the physiological organism in perfection. 

Even the exercise of this power is a gradual process. The 
babe sees first its little hands, its mother's face, and slowly more 
and more of the outside world comes within its vision. 

The vision grows with intelligence. An ancient ruin may 
mean only a heap of stones to one, to another it may be an 
artistic study with the ivy clinging to it, another may see there 
the history of a nation past and gone. So it is that spiritual 
vision comes by development and we see God more and more 
as we exercise that power. 

Third, focus of vision. The eye must be centered on the 
object. The landscape may be very beautiful but unless the 
eye be focused upon it we have no realization of it. The higher 
the elevation the broader the vision. 



140 CHRISTI IMAGO 

So the eye of the soul must be focused on Christ to receive 
the divine life, high from the mists and fogs of earth, from 
those obstructions of vision, selfish aims, greed of wealth, rivalry 
of i)ower. "If thy eye be single, thy whole body will be full of 
light." The vision of God comes by spiritual sight to the 
spiritual mind and there enters the spiritual life the image of 
God. We get some conception of the outside world by other 
senses. We smell the flower, feel the stone, hear the music of 
the waterfall. So some get an idea of God by study, by the 
experience of others, but the knowledge of God, which is eternal 
life, comes only by purity of sight. 

How great the darkness to the blind eye which sees not 
the beautiful world! Greater still is the darkened spiritual 
vision to him who sees not God. 

May our eye be always single, may our life be always pure, 
may our gaze be always fixed amid the discord, distractions, 
pleasures, and sorrows of the world, until at last we be filled 
with Christ's vision to behold His face forever ! 



FAITHFULNESS 

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

TN the matchless east pediment of the Parthenon we observe 
that as much delicacy and care were bestowed on the parts 
barely visible to the spectator's eye as on the more prominent 
members. A close examination shows exquisite workmanship 
of the carving of the seats where rest the two female figures 
interpreted by some critics as the Horae who guard the portal 
of Olympus. The strict geometrical outline of the seats forms 
a most pleasing contrast to the flowing drapery. 

But more than this. In the extreme corner where the 
sun-god was rising from the eastern sea the angle was so dark 
that only the rays of the rising sun could illumine the figure. 
Yet there is no doubt of the same accuracy of execution which 
was revealed in the colossal sculptures of the central angle. 

Might not the sculptor have been tempted to say, "Why 
this painstaking labor ? Few will notice and few will criticise." 
So many speak of the wonderful power of the Greek chisel 
over the marble. It is not wonderful. One word explains it 
all, and that is faithfulness^ faithfulness in smallest details, 
faithfulness in what might pass unnoticed and unseen. This 
alone brings perfection. 

The building of our character is like the shaping of the 
stone. We are like the rough and irregular blocks, but faith- 
fulness, not in great things merely — that is comparatively easy. 



142 CHRISTI I^^IAGO 

■when the world looks on and great issues are at stake — but 
faithfulness in little things, faithfulness in the tasks of every 
day, faithfulness in service, love, unselfishness, faithfulness in 
pain and sorrow, faithfulness in effort, faithfulness in thought, 
faithfulness in truth, this will mould through the passing of 
the days our lives and hearts after the pattern of the Christ 
till we hear Him say, "Well done, faithful servant." We shall 
find that the faithfulness in small things carries with it the 
divine pledge of our capacity for faithfulness in greater things. 

Don't we realize now something of what it means to enter 
into "the joy of our Lord" ? God is a God of faithfulness. The 
infinite delicacy in workmanship of leaf and flower and stem, 
which only the microscope can bring to our notice, reveals 
God's working in little things. Is He not just as faithful in 
His creation of the smallest creeping insect of a day as He 
is in that of the majestic grandeur of the starry heavens which 
shine by night? 

We say that nature never makes a mistake. We mean 
just this, that God's work in small things and in great things, 
in this world and in worlds upon worlds beyond man's under- 
standing, is never faithless. Can we enter into the joy of such 
a God while we remain faithless servants? 

We admire a beautiful building, but what we really admire 
is the builder's faithfulness in his art. Wood and stone remain 
wood and stone until the soul of the architect enters them. 

A piece of canvas can be bought for a few cents, but the 
same piece of canvas upon which a E^phael's hand has wrought 
cannot be bought for thousands of dollars. 

So human life, a tabula rasa in itself, is made precious or 
valueless, as we draw or do not draw the outlines day by day. 

Time is colorless. We put our own coloring into it. We 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 143 

can make it dark with envy, avarice, selfishness. We can make 
it lurid with hate, impurity, pride. We can make it bright 
with faith, refulgent with love, pure with consecrated service. 
Yes, we can make it transcendently beautiful and holy with the 
glory of God Himself. 



GOD'S WHISPER TO THE SOUL 

ALL saints' day 

ROW must that man have felt who in tlie dark beginning of 
human life was the first that was called upon to look upon 
death ? He knelt beside the form of one he loved, and with per- 
plexed and aching heart watched the life gradually but surely 
ebbing away as the snow melts before the burning rays of 
the sun. 

When the spirit had passed, and the body was cold and 
silent, think you not that there was something in that human 
heart that spoke to him that told him that his loved one still 
lived ? He could not perhaps have defined that voice. He could 
not have told how he knew, but there was something which 
whispered that the dear life now gone beyond the sensuous was 
in the safe keeping of Him who created it, that love could not 
be more perishable than the power which made it. Did God 
leave His child comfortless ? Xo. The whisper was the whisper 
of God Himself. 

This whisper is voiced by the human heart in the earliest 
literature of our race. As an illustration of the confident 
assurance of a life beyond I translate a few lines from one of 
the burial hymns of the Rig Veda. Here we find no shadows, 
no questioning as these early mourners stood beside the open 
grave. 

"Go forth, thou spirit, go forth along the paths where thy 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 145 

fathers have trod. There they are preparing a place for thee, 
a pasture land, a resting place. Ascend to highest heaven where 
thou shalt behold God, leaving on earth all that is unpraise- 
worthy." These sentences chosen at random from many others 
of like purport illustrate the whispered assurance of a meeting 
in the unseen world. 

I cannot refrain from making one comment on the Sanskrit 
word avasana which I translated "resting place." It means 
literally an "unyoking." The weary cattle have come to the 
pasture land where the yoke is taken from the neck; the weary 
wanderer has reached "the bound of life where he lays his 
burden down." 

From the time when man first stood in awe before this 
solemn mystery to the form which only yesterday was laid away 
in Christian trust, the divine in man answering to the divine 
above has sung hallelujahs in the blessed hope of everlasting life. 

The inmost consciousness in undying existence is more than 
intellect. Love is vaster than our comprehension of it. Knowl- 
edge is deeper than our understanding. The soul is greater than 
psychology. 

In the Phaedo of Plato we feel it is not so much the argu- 
ments of that matchless dialogue as it is the conviction that 
Socrates has heard the divine voice speaking. He has obeyed 
that voice and has stood for truth, for duty, for right, for 
fidelity. He talks with us not in the bustle of the street, but in 
the gloom of the prison at sunrise of his last day on earth. We 
find him clasping the hand of God in calm composure as if 
nearness to the unseen brought clearer vision. Trustfully he sees 
beyond death. When the mantle is removed and we look with 
Crito on the face of the dead, we feel that God had spoken to 
him clearly and truly. 



146 CHRISTI IMAGO 

Emerson in his Essay on Immortality confesses himself to 
be a better believer than a propounder of his faith. Life with 
its grand sweep of moral vision speaks of larger life. Character 
made sublime by consecration to service, calmness made holy 
by the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, the divine 
vision of the truth gained by close communion with God, these 
are guaranties of immortality. God has whispered it to us and 
He will never deceive us. 

But to us comes more than a whisper. Speaking through 
the lips of His Divine Son, He bids us not to be troubled, that 
there are mansions prepared for us, and as if we still might 
question and wonder He makes this solemn pledge: "If it were 
not so I would have told you." 



PROGRESS 

TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

eXCAVATIONS on the Acropolis at Athens brought to light 
fragments of the pediment composition of the earlier 
Parthenon. The theme was very grotesque and archaic, and as 
crudely and tastelessly executed. A typhon's or serpent's tail 
which uncoils as the pediment rises occupies the space of the 
narrow angle. 

Another stage in the history of pediment composition is 
marked by the Aeginetan sculptures where dead or dying men 
are thrown into the low space. A further advance appears in 
the temple of Zeus at Olympia where the theme admits of the 
introduction of river gods in the narrow corners of the pediment. 

Think for a moment of the perplexing problem that con- 
fronted the artist, a problem the most serious which human 
ingenuity could encounter. In the center of the triangular field 
there was room for colossal figures, while in the narrow angles 
there was space hardly for a reclining form. Yet the sculptor 
must place therein figures in high relief which would be in 
perfect accord with the severe stateliness of the Doric temple. 

This could be accomplished only in one way, but that way 
was the same way which has led to success since the world 
began, toilsome, faitliful, gradual progress. 

There is nothing that shows the consummate power of the 
master over the marble as the sculptures of the later Parthenon, 



148 CHRISTI BIAGO 

for iu one narrow corner were placed tlie horses of the sun god 
rising above the eastern waters, and in the other the moon god- 
dess sinking in the west, a motive which seems well nigh impos- 
sible for such position. It was easy to put a serpent's tail in 
the pediment angle, easy to place dead men in such a space, but 
it taxed the sculptor's art to the extreme limit to carve in that 
narrow and narrowing field the prancing steeds of the god 
of day. 

The great lesson here preserved imperishably in marble 
comes to every life. Thank God for difficulty. It is only by 
meeting difficulty and mastering it that we become strong men. 

We sometimes hear the remark made to a child, '^You are 
having your happiest days." Whether that is true or not will 
depend entirely on the individual. If the life goes on wdthout 
achievement, if the life continues selfish, if it is more and more 
filled w4th pride, prejudice, jealousy, hate, impurity, and mean- 
ness, then childhood days are and always will be the happiest 
days. 

But if the sign manual of life is progress, if, as the years 
pass, the soul advances in truth, daily growing more manly, 
more courageous, more divine, filled more and more with the 
spirit of service, love and beauty, the happy years of life are the 
limitless years which will unfold the divineness of our humanity. 

God loves the beautiful and the good, but He wants them 
at their best, and at an infijiite cost He has been working 
throughout the ages to bring them to their best. This intelligent 
onward movement through life and history implies vaster results 
in the future than iu the past. Sometimes we may think there 
is retrogression in nature when we see growth impaired and 
beauty sullied, but one fact is certain — that all retardation is 
compensated for by progress. In the grand result nature never 



OR THE CHRISTED LIFE 149 

works backward but forward. This is the divine mode of 
activity, a movement which is revealed to man as his capacity 
becomes adequate to receive such revelation. That which has 
highest "survival value" is the moral and intellectual nature of 
man, and God's decree of perfection will be realized in the soul. 

Does the flower feel sorry because it is not the seed? Does 
the forest oak regret that it is not the acorn ? 

Life is divine growth, and divine growth is happiness. 



A HOLY TEMPLE 

TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY 

CHERE is no building of ancient Rome so well preserved as 
the Pantheon. From the huge inscription on its architrave 
ascribing its erection to the son-in-law of Augustus, Marcus 
Agrippa, to the columns and niches of the interior, the structure 
is almost the same as in the days of imperial Rome. As far 
as we know no service to the ancient gods was solemnized after 
400 A. D., and in the year 608 Pope Boniface IV. consecrated 
the temple as a Christian Church under the title S. Maria ad 
Martyres. We are glad that to-day the old building bears again 
its historic name and that over the portal stands the cross of 
our Redeemer. 

We enter and in the recesses where once stood the great 
central image of Jupiter, surrounded by other gods, we see the 
sacred statues of saint and Madonna and of our Lord Himself. 
Above our heads the great aperture of the dome shows the clear 
vault of heaven. Through it we can wat<jh the floating clouds. 

It seems under the solemn music of the Mass that the sun- 
light coming from God's sky fills the ancient shrine with a 
peculiar benediction. The open blue heaven of God seems very 
near, interposing between the prayers of the worshipper and 
itself no barrier of wood or stone. 

The ancient pagan temple now dedicated to Christianity 
is the type of the human soul redeemed from self and conse- 



THE CHRISTED LIFE 151 

crated to Christly service. How complete is that self-renuncia- 
tion is known only to that soul and God. Its Christianity 
may be of mongrel type. The pure life of Jesus in the soul 
may be marred and sullied by hate, envy, meanness, prejudice, 
and pride. 

The temple of the soul may be only half dedicated to Christ. 
Christianity, which is Christ's life in ourselves, is nothing less 
than the substitution of God's will for our will, humanity for 
egoism, service for selfishness, largeness of vision for narrow- 
ness, love for hate, beauty for the ugliness of jealousy and pride, 
integrity and large-heartedness for dishonor and meanness, 
truth for falsehood. 

It is easy to pray, but it is not easy to have the heart in 
communion with God. It is easy to profess the name of Christ, 
but it is not easy to live the Christ life hour by hour, and day 
by day. Yet this is just what Christianity demands of us. This 
is the dedication of the soul to God, a dedication more holy, 
more solemn, more real than the words of papal consecration 
over stone or marble. 

The "Chapel of the Popes" above the scala santa is a holy 
of holies because of the presence of a sacred picture of our 
Saviour. Tradition says that the Madonna and the disciples 
met together after our Lord had ascended to heaven and asked: 
"How can we preserve the love and beauty on the face of our 
blessed Christ?" It was agreed that St. Luke should paint for 
all time that holy countenance, but as he began to work angelic 
hands supplied the tints. So forever the sacred painting bore 
the name acheiropoeton, "not made by human hands." 

If this be true it would be a sweet privilege to gaze upon 
the face of our Saviour as He walked with men. But we see 
Him, not in miraculous icon, but in the life of loving service. 



152 CHRISTI IMAGO 

Believe it, each act of holy ministration to the suffering, the 
sorrowing, the needy, the outcast, brings to our soul a picture 
of the Lord of love, a picture not painted by human fingers, a 
picture not visible to human sight. But we can see His smile 
of approval as He says, "Service unto the least of these is service 
unto Me." 



APOSTLESHIP 

SUNDAY NEXT BEFORE ADVENT 

PAUL an apostle of Jesus Christ." An apostle of Christ 
means literally, "Christ-sent." The term shows us that life 
is a mission, a Christly mission, and the test of our apostleship 
is our faithfulness unto this Christly calling. 

I fear our conception of Christianity has not always held 
this clearly in view. In the Musee des Archives at Paris I re- 
member seeing a picture of a great ship typifying the Church 
of God. Those on board are very complacent, self-satisfied, and 
happy. They seem to have no concern for the sinful souls strug- 
gling in the deep waters. The ship is to them an ark of salvation 
and they are safe on board. But I am sure of one thing. Christ 
is not on that ship, for if He were He would reach out His 
hand to save even the very last. The conception of the artist 
which made possible such a painting, and its sanction by those 
in authority, show us how far away we are from the world-vision 
of Christ. 

Professor Harnack of Berlin defines Christianity as that 
mighty potentiality by which suffering and sunken humanity is 
raised God-ward. 

I have seen the peasants entering the little shrines at 
Athens, each with a lighted taper which he places in a bronze 
receptacle beside the altar. But from these little individual 
contributions the dark and gloomy interior is illumined with 



154 CHRISTI IMAGO 

a brilliant radiance. So is the mission of the Church. Each 
member must bring in his pure light till the world is filled with 
the beauty of the Christ. 

Apostleship shows the dignity of life. We are God's am- 
bassadors. That is a grand thought and Christ Himself gives 
us our credentials, "As the Father sent Me so send I you." 
These words mean that we enter into the same struggle, the same 
service, the same redemptive mission, as that of our Lord, and 
with the same consecration, the same courage, the same unselfish 
love. Yes, they mean that when men look upon our faces they 
see the face of Jesus, and when they come in touch with our lives 
they receive the spirit of Christ. 

Apostleship gives the joy of life; not the joy of throbbing 
health, the joy of living in this great world, for these pale. The 
pulse becomes feeble and pleasure dims. But the thought that 
brings abiding joy is that in all we do we are Christ-sent, that 
God sends us into our daily task as His servants, His workmen. 
If I am strong, let me rejoice, because God has given me 
strength to serve and help and bless. God needs me, for my life 
is bound up in His eternal plan. 

Apostleship explains the mystery of life. There comes the 
certain knowledge of the permanency of our work reaching on 
into the limitless years. A veil hides each future step. We 
cannot see the goal. But all is well, for God is the impelling 
power. 

The arrow sees not the mark. It feels only the twang of 
the bow-string, but it speeds on its course as a thing of life. 
It swerves not to right or left. It cuts the opposing air, but 
it finds its rest in the heart of the target, for it was sent by the 
trained hand of the bowman. So we do not know God's plan, 
but we do know that it is He who sends us. That is enough. 



OR THE OHPvISTED LIFE 155 

We go forward. It is God's direction for our lives, and we shall 
reach the Father's goal. 

Why do I toil for truth? Because I am God-sent. 

Why do I have courage for the right? Because I am God- 
sent. 

Why am I honest and true in business? Because I am 
God-sent. 

Why do I pass through sorrow? Because I am God-sent. 

Why am I a Christian? Because I am God-sent. 

This is apostleship. 

Let this word "God-sent" be our hope in blessing and pain, 
in joy and sorrow. And in death, as the soul goes out into the 
Great Beyond, let it be our triumphant cry, "God-sent." 



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